Inaccuracy Lies Everywhere

Okay, maybe not everywhere. But it's very common. Even in the equine world!

A major annoyance to horse color geneticists is how inaccurate colors on a horse's registered papers may be. Most people either don't know, or don't care to know, the difference between bay silver and chestnut, for example. So hey - don't always considers colors on registry papers as accurate.

(If details on registry papers were always accurate, that'd mean that it's completely possible for two chestnuts to produce a bay: It isn't. Remember that details on registry papers come from the owners, not always a color geneticist. There will be mistakes, and we've got to count that in when looking at papers for something so precise as color alleles.)

Another thing that hopefully doesn't happen too much, is something I noticed the other day. I was working on horsey homework for my state's horsey club, and listing down horse breeds and three conformational characteristics about each breed.

Have you ever noticed how some books (such as Ultimate Horse and Horses: Eyewitness Handbooks) share many photos of the same horse, but the photos were shot on opposite sides of the horse? Now, I don't have any problem with that. It just means the photographer got a bit more money from each photoshoot without having copyright violations or whatever.

Anyway, I was going through my Ultimate Horse book as well as my younger sis' Horses: Eyewitness Handbooks book at the same time. When I noticed something very peculiar and somewhat disturbing: The breed profile pictures for Landais and Pottock were swapped in these two books.

In my book, it had a gorgeous, snappy-looking liver chestnut as the Landais, and a black horse as the Pottock. In my younger sister's book, the chestnut was the Pottock, and the Landais was the black.

Isn't that just annoying! Both books cannot be correct. It's one thing to have the same horse for the same breed profile in separate books, but it's completely different to have facts that do not comply from presumably (not so anymore!) accurate horse books.

Anyway, enough for now. Time to get to bed and stuff and wake up at 4:15 tomorrow for the show. Cheers!

...Actually, I'm gonna have this schedule to publish on Sunday. It bugs me (well, only somewhat) when I have two posts on the same day, and I'll see if I can write up a post tomorrow (Saturday) reviewing the horse show.

*yawns* Night!