Stylish

Stylish is a chestnut roan and white mare that came last year. It sounds like we'll be selling her - but she does have the potential to throw nice foals, so perhaps we can keep her.

Caught red-handed! (Yep, Stylish is the boss of Royale.)

Oh hi.

Lol.

Confirmed Hypothesis

Just the other day, I got a chance to talk to a lady who attended college solely for learning about horse genetics. A couple points she made were foreign to me, but I'll take her word for it for unless I hear otherwise from a reputable source.

First of all, I learned that approximately half the population of horses have a roan gene, but it doesn't always appear if it isn't prominent enough (so it isn't a dominant gene, it's recessive). Which explains how one of my friends got a chestnut roan from two solid chestnuts.

Also concerning roan, it is possible to get the roan gene from the sabino gene. So now Cayenne's coloring is possible, yay!

I asked her one more question- how do you get a bay from a palomino and a chestnut? Okay, this is the one piece of information that seems iffy-ish to me, so I'll have to look into it further. Either way, she said that palomino's can indeed be a black base color, but you cannot see it because of the palomino dilution.

EDIT: Now, I would disagree. One copy of a cream gene on black does not produce a palomino-colored horse. Turns out that the "chestnut" is actually a silver bay.

So, that's that. If I remember what I had wanted to write about, or find that list of topics to write about, I'll try to do another blog post soon. :) And one that's a bit more interesting.

Cayenne - A Sabino Roan

Cayenne is an adorable miniature colt that is going to be weaned soon. Up to this past Tuesday, I have been thinking and thinking about his coloring, and trying to figure it out. Just to make things clearer for you, right now he appears to be a chestnut roan sabino.

As a foal, his owner and I thought he would just be a light chestnut with a fair amount of chrome (in the Miniature horse world, this means white or markings). After a bit of maturing we could tell that yes, he will have high lacy stockings on his hind legs, an apron face, and perhaps more. Then, we got to what puzzled me- he appeared to have roaning in his phenotype (appearance)!

Myself being into horse genetics and knowing the coloring of Cayenne's parents, here are some facts.

• Roan is a dominant gene. If a horse has it, it'll show up.
• To get a true roan, one of the parents has to be a roan.
• Neither of Cayenne's parents were a roan.
• Pepper, the late sire, was a buckskin sabino.
• Birdy, Cayenne's dam, is a light solid palomino.

What I didn't remember until last Tuesday was that the sabino gene can include the roan gene (even if it isn't a true roan). Apparently Pepper had seemed roan until he was a yearling, at which time he lost the roaning, but still was sabino. (Not sure if that'd affect much or not though.)

My current hypothesis is that a sabino horse can yield a sabino foal with roaning, even if the parent was a roan-less sabino. I'm still trying to figure out how a different friend got a chestnut roan out of her two solid chestnut Walkers, but perhaps I'll discover the reasoning behind that one later. Or perhaps it was a freak accident, who knows? *shrugs*

To close, if you want to see a picture or few of Cayenne, here're a few from last Tuesday. :)

Cayenne *finally* standing still for a picture.

And walking, which was rare for his energetic little self.

Eatin' grass with Mommy.

I got an itch, and I just gotta get it!