What color is this stallion? I have no idea.

[Caramelapple3]

Prince Handsome SG

Can anyone tell me the color of this horse? I found him in the market at a surprisingly cheap price and decided to buy him. His color is beautiful, and I know he has dapples and a naturally shiny coat, but other than that I am clueless.

[Silverine]

Prince Handsome SG

Can anyone tell me the color of this horse? I found him in the market at a surprisingly cheap price and decided to buy him. His color is beautiful, and I know he has dapples and a naturally shiny coat, but other than that I am clueless.

Good pick-up on the dapples. The dapples in this case tell you a lot. We know they are not sooty dapples because, rather than darkening the base coat around the dapples, they have instead lightened the base coat within the dapples. (For an example, compare your boy's dapples to the dapples on this horse, which are caused by sooty.) Since the dapples are not caused by sooty that means they have to be caused by the silver gene which means that your boy is black-based. The lightening on his legs is also caused by the silver gene. It's basically a silver version of pangare.

So, we know your boy is black + silver. Looking at him a little closer we can see that he has freckles on his muzzle. That means he has the champagne gene. So black + silver + champagne. But those three things alone would not lighten him up like he is, so we know there has to be another dilution in there. But what is it? In this case his eyes are the giveaway. Being bright blue like they are we know that he is double-cream. He also does not have tiger eye.

All of this together makes your boy a Silver Smokey Cream Champagne.

In case you're interested, after a look at his parents we can tell that he only has one copy of champagne and one copy of silver. So all of his foals will have at least one copy of the cream gene (whether or not they have more than that will depend on the dam), but only half of his foals will have champagne and/or silver. His genes would look something like this:

gg E? aa Chch CrCr dd Zz tete toto lplp

I left off the flaxen and pangare genes as they do not show on a black coat so we have no way of knowing what he carries there at this point.


There is one caveat to the above analysis: after looking more closely at his sire, the sire is a cream-pearl rather than a double cream. We know this because the sire's sire did not have a cream gene which means the only dilution he could have passed down is a hidden pearl. Because the sire and your boy are so similar in coloration it is possible that your boy is also a cream-pearl rather than a double cream. (We know that your boy got a cream from his mother as that was the only dilution gene she had, but at the moment there is no way to tell what your boy got from his sire.) If that is the case your boy is a Silver Smokey Black Pearl Champagne and rather than CrCr he would be Crprl.

Testing this is easy enough. To determine whether or not he is double-cream simply breed him to undiluted mares (no cream or pearl). If he ever throws a foal that appears undiluted (bay, brown, black, or chestnut) rather than a single cream (buckskin, smoky brown, smoky black, or palomino) then you know that he carries a pearl gene. If he does not then it is safe to assume he is double-cream.

[Caramelapple3]

Thanks, this was very helpful.