Serene Sunday

Chance has kept on weight for the summer!  This is a win for us!

Is Seamus really a black horse?

 Horse coat color is apparently complicated. Many people think they have a black horse but they don't or they have a black horse that doesn't look black in the summer. Seamus is registered black with the Kentucky Mountain Saddle Horse Association. I didn't quite believe it since he started to look like a sooty buckskin or bay in the summer with his coat bleaching. Maybe he was actually bay or had a dun gene?

The day he arrive at Geek Acres he was black....yes tips of the mane and tail had some fading but that is common in a lot of horses and hence why many bag their show horses tails.  I don't care.  I keep them as tidy as I can in while being in the fields living like a horse.

In February and March horses begin to lose their winter coats.  It was apparent some of his worn out winter coat hairs, the lighter ones were getting ready to shed and the darker coat was coming in.

By May he was a shiny blackish color, I would say dark bay without having seen any genetic results.

As the heat came on and the summer sun blazed on he would continue to fade.  I would rinse him after rides or really hot days but honestly, who can do that everyday in the NC summer heat?  I don't want to keep a sheet on him, even a fly sheet unless really necessary. Even with a mesh fly sheet there is still a lot of heat held in and that just seems miserable!!

He certainly looks like a dark bay or seal brown horse in some of these images.  What I find interesting is the spotted quality.  Note the lighter hairs and then the splotches of black hair speckled throughout and then patches of darker areas on his neck.  That is weird.....right?

This year the end of June hit and Seamus was pretty much a bay, or sooty buckskin in looks.

Last fall when his old summer coat shed the darker hairs were coming in.  In October at an obstacle clinic here he is with a dark, shiny coat once again!

He must be a fancy hypercolor horse like those heat activated shirts from the early 90's!!

I decided to get him genetically tested.  I also took a look at diet, in particular microminerals. The black coat, any dark coat for that matter, requires a higher a level of certain minerals to produce the melanin.  I'd had him on a balancer for grass hay and then supplemented with Nuhoof which has.....you guessed it Zinc and copper in it which is also one of the requirements for hoof growth.  Makes sense right?  Hooves and hair have keratin as a main component. He should have been getting what he needed.

The test results were in....

Guess what color Seamus 's genetic report indicated?

Black.

He is "EE"- meaning no red factor, these are two dominant alleles, Red is recessive, you need two recessives "ee" to show the Red phenotype (aka Daenerys). An "Ee" horse would not be Red, since you need two recessive "e's" to express the red color but could obviously pass on that gene....not gonna go down the Punnett squares explanation. So many resources online if you want to really delve into it and learn!!

Agouti affects the distribution of black pigment if a horse has any, "Ee" or "EE".

Seamus is "aa" for Agouti. A bay horse only needs one dominant "A" to have the black coloration restricted to just the points just the points like in a bay (mane, tail and legs Aa, AA). If there are two recessive copies then the distribution is over the entire body of the horse (aka black)

Lastly there is no Dun dilution gene; he is nd2/nd2 (Dun horse dilution genes)

So he is black.  Any fading I am seeing is caused by  1) Nutrition and 2) Environment.

I can only do so much with the environment so I will focus on nutrition since even with my supplementation there is an imbalance somewhere even though I have made sure to up the intake of Zinc and Copper.  What is going on?

I will save that investigation for another post since it involves several Excel spreadsheets, hay testing and lots of "WTFs?" to be honest....