I am asking out of ignorance...

[Jean_B]

Personally, color doesn't mean squat as far as I am concerned when it comes to what I buy, and what I breed my mares to. As far as I am concerned, there are a LOT of ugly (i.e., poorly conformed) horses resulting from programs breeding strictly for color. The ONLY thing I consider is conformation. Period. As others said, color is important (to me) ONLY for identification purposes. And then I much prefer to rely on DNA testing for reliability as far as identification of offspring (thru parentage qualification).

 

[The Simple Life Farm]

Thanks Songcatcher for the info link. I am going to try my hand at understanding this color genetics thing. I figure I can't ever learn too much about these kids.

Thanks everyone for the replies, it has been very educational for me.

Kelly

 

[Warpony]

What really ticks me off is when the registries won't register your horses correctly! I ended up with a solid silver bay this year and both AMHA and AMHR changed it to sorrel! What is with that! Genetically it's not even close!

The reason they changed it to sorrel is because they go on the phenotype for registrtion purposes. When a person looks at a horse, the color they appear is what needs to be for identification purposes. If you were pulled over by a state trooper and he wanted to see traveling papers and you presented him with papers calling a red horse a bay, you would probably find yourself explaining it to a judge downtown and proving you're not a horse theif. In fact, AMHR states the color on registration papers will be the phenotype ( appearance) color of the horse, as it should be.

I do think that if people wanted genotype listed on their horses papers and were willing to pay to have it done, there should be a space provided on the papers for that purpose but, it should not be a requirement.

What gets to me is that I have seen older papers from AMHR that say Silver Bay... and on their own web site under "forms online" if you look at the PDF called "Color chart" it lists Silver Bay under "Bay" NOT sorrel. So mine got changed to bay, and yours got changed to sorrel. That makes no sense to me at all. It's like there is no consistency here at all. And I don't understand why that can't just call it what it IS.