The Equine Tapestry

That’s the print test that arrived late last night. It came with some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that I will not be able to get books printed in time for BreyerFest, which was my original goal. I knew that was probably a long shot because it was unlikely that everything would turn out perfectly on the first try. Technology has changed a lot since I was last involved in printing, but I was pretty sure that part of it was still the same. Things always go wrong at the printers. Always.

I knew I was looking at a lot of different quality issues, which is why I sent off a sample section to be printed. That’s what I am holding in the picture. (That’s why it is a small, saddle-stitched booklet, rather than a perfect-bound 430+ page book.) I did not know what to expect from the newer Print-On-Demand (POD) technology. I wasn’t even sure I would go that route, because some of the issues I had been told to expect gave me pause. Ideally I would prefer to go that route because I would love to hand off the fulfillment aspect over to another entity so I can return to the studio. Places that do that (companies like Lulu and Createspace) all use the same print-on-demand technology.

What I had heard was that that the color printing, which is used on the covers, leaves something to be desired. That one issue, paired with the still-high costs involved, is why this particular set of books are being designed in black and white. An expensive book with questionable color was a non-starter. I must admit that while it is not the same as offset printing, and I suspect their press wasn’t calibrated well (too much magenta), it wasn’t as awful as I had been lead to expect. It is the kind of compromise I expected with Print-On-Demand.  (And yes, I know… a book about color in black and white? I’ll talk more about that later in the post.)

But it was the black and white interior where I found the problems.

Oh, that won't do at all!

Despite meticulously following the instructions for “best results”, many of the photos and illustrations came out too dark. I don’t need color to show how unusual the patterning is on the Hackney in that first photo, but I do need people to be able to see the pattern!

The same image using a wide range of level and curve adjustments

The remedy is to go in and tweak the problem images in Photoshop and print another test to determine which settings will work best. It still amazes me that this is actually economically feasible for a printing company, but it is apparently how it is done.

There was some good news that came out of my test, though. As I mentioned, these books are being printed in black and white. Part of that is the economics, but part is also the subject matter. As I have said before, these are not “how to identify you horse’s color” books. Until color printing becomes more accessible, that kind of information is far better suited to a place like this blog. Instead, these books are about the history of horse color in different breeds. In many ways, they are as much about the history of the different breeds as they are about color specifically. As a result, a large portion of the photos are already black and white because they are old. For some all we have are engravings (like the horse in the image above).

Those images are really important to properly tell these stories, but in many cases the image quality is really poor. Often the sole remaining image of a historical animal is the one that was printed in a stud book. Stud books were often printed fairly cheaply on paper little better than newsprint. For others, the pictures come from old periodicals or bulletins issued by agricultural departments. Those were the images that motivated me to print a test section, because I needed to know if they could be included. With modern pictures I have the option of contacting owners and photographers for an alternate, but for the historic horses often there is only one (bad!) image. If that one image didn’t work, I might need to formulate another plan. But ironically, the bad photos printed well. In some cases, far better than they should have! So while the fix for the dark photos is going to be time consuming, at least there is a fix.

The other great irony?

This was easier to do. When I first announced that there would be books, I had a lot of people ask if they would be offered as e-books or downloads. I said I would try, but I really wasn’t sure that I was up for a great technical challenge like that.

Oddly enough, getting the manuscript into Kindle format was really simple. In fact the biggest challenge wasn’t technical, but one of layout. How could I break down the charts and diagrams (like the one those sample homozygous splash overos came from) so that they worked with that kind of format? That is actually a lot more fun than figuring out levels and curves and file formats! And since I own a Kindle, it is easy to see exactly what my readers will get. I am also told that if I use color images, those devices that can do color will show them in color. That might be the answer for color publishing in the future. So yes, there will be an electronic version eventually. After I figure out how to make the less high-tech version work for me!

The full horse from the previous post, showing a rather impressive variety of pattern edges all on one horse.

"My face doesn't look like it belongs with my butt!"

The recent discussion of the possible sabino-manchado horse has had me thinking about the topic that has consumed much of my attention for the last few years, which is pattern interaction. That was the subject that I began to explore in a series of articles for the magazine published for the (now sadly gone) Realistic Equine Sculpture Society. I had touched upon it before in presentations, but only in the most superficial way, because exploring the ways that the different patterns interact is speculative. We cannot test for most of these patterns, and to make matters worse we already know that some of what we call a pattern (like sabino) is actually a catch-all phrase for a group of patterns that may in fact prove to be quite different from one another. When teaching about horse color, it seemed less confusing to stick with what was actually known.

But just as my friend Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig pointed out in a recent blog post about the difference between anatomical charts and living, breathing animals, and how important that is for anyone wishing to convey life in their sculpture, so too is there a difference between the rules and categories of coat color genetics and the living animals we encounter. Much of what is said about horse color is simplified. It has to be; that is the first step to understanding it. But once those concepts are clear – once a person understands that this is a frame and that a tobiano and that a sabino – then the next step is exploring the far more complicated way that color presents on individual horses.

And one of the biggest influences on that is the way that the different patterns interact. Someone questioned the use of “portions” of the photos in the previous post, but that is exactly what pattern interaction is about. When there are two (or more) patterns, which portions remain? Which are lost? Which get changed so that they look different from either of the original pattern?

In the next few days I am going to try to reformat some of the information that appeared in the RESS articles, and hopefully from there start exploring the topic further.

I have had a few people ask me what made the Pato horse so different from any other sabino roan. Several people suggested that the horse looked no different from horses like the one pictured to the left of this group. (That photo came from Notorious Stock, and can be seen in its entirety here.) I’ve set the horse from the previous post alongside him with a photo of a leopard appaloosa rump beside it. It is the organization of the spots on the pato horse into clusters, which are reminiscent of a leopard, that made me wonder if he was displaying a manchado pattern along with sabino. The horse caught my eye because he doesn’t look exactly like either a sabino roan or a leopard, but visually falls somewhat in between.

I also had someone say they had not seen a manchado that looked “anything like” a leopard complex horse. Here is another comparison shot.

It is the quantity of round spots set inside the white ground, often concentrated on the hindquarters, that gives the manchado pattern a leopard-like appearance. (Left is a manchado, right is an appaloosa. Photo used with permission.)

That’s not to say that sabinos cannot have round spots set within a white ground.

But it is unusual to see that concentrated on the top of the rump, and spread continuously over the whole horse. We don’t know that it is impossible, but the oddity of it made me suspect something else might be there.

I encountered this roan Saddlebred at a local show this past winter. Roan Saddlebreds are extremely rare, and the few modern examples I have seen have all been bay roans. Classic, dark-headed roan is frequently linked to the gene that makes horses bay or black, so chestnut roan is less common in many breeds.

This gal was odd even for a roan. Perhaps most striking was her mane, which went from red at the roots to white in the middle to red at the bottom againt. The owner allowed me to pull some hairs, and they were all banded in this fashion. She said the mare (who obviously had some age on her) had always been this way. She also said that she was much lighter in the summer, which is pretty typical of roans.

The hairs in her tail were also banded, though not as consistently so the effect was not as dramatic.

She was also faintly dappled. I tried without much success to capture them in a few pictures, but the show grounds there are set up terribly from a photographers standpoint!

In many ways she reminded me of the odd sabino roans that Laura Behning found in Morgans, perhaps because of the white dappling.

Her owner also said that the mare came as a surprise to her breeders because both the sire and dam were ordinary chestnuts, and there was no history of roans in her family. I haven’t taken the time to track down her pedigree to confirm that, but if that is true that would make her all the more unusual.

I made the mistake of calling the horse in the most recent post a polo pony, but Martina pointed out that he is actually a pato horse. I linked to this video in the comments, but I thought I would put it here so it gets seen. (I am not sure the comments come through for those that are subscribed to the blog, especially if they are made later.)

It is certain a sport for the brave… and the young! I fear I have hit the age where a peaceful trail ride without stirrups is about as daring as I get.

Martina has more pictures of the sport here.

As I mentioned in the comments of my previous post, Martina Vannelli sent me photos of an oddly patterned Argentinian Polo Pony. I suspected at the time that he was another manchado. His spotting pattern is smaller and denser than that of the others I have seen, but I suspect that may be the effect of one of the sabino genes. Often sabino interacts with other patterning genes by breaking down the original pattern into smaller pieces.

His leg raps make it hard to see his markings but it appears that he has stockings on at least some of his legs. And of course his blazed face is typical of sabino.

We honestly don’t have enough pictures of manchado from enough angles to know exactly what it does, but given that it is primarily a top-down dorsal pattern (unlike sabino which is a bottom-up ventral pattern) I think that sabino might be redirecting the pattern somewhat on this horse. The markings here on the chest are a good example. It is a location that I would expect on a sabino, but the character of the patterning is a little different.

This is the angle that, to me at least, looks most like the manchado pattern. The round appaloosa-like spots is typical – just there are more of them, and each spot is smaller – as is the white tail. White tails seem to be a pretty consistent feature of the pattern.

I want to thank Martina for allowing me to share her photographs. And for those that just like to see pretty horse imagery, I highly recommend her Flickr account. She does beautiful work documenting the horses in Argentina.

Manchado is an extremely rare pinto pattern that has – to date at least – been found only in Argentina. Ever since I first began talking about the manchado pattern, that fact has caused many people to ask if I think there is essentially “something in the water” down there in Argentina that makes that strange color. Some assume that since the pattern is constrained to just that one country, it must be environmental. I am skeptical that there is something unique to any one country that can create such a dramatic pattern. Countries are, after all, human constructs. Why in Argentina, and not Brazil? Or Chile?

To me, it seems more likely that geographic constraints on a color are about founder effect, and not something strange in the Argentinian atmosphere. To put the founder effect in layman’s terms, it simply means that when you start a new group with a small set of animals, the quirky aspects of that specific set of individuals skew what happens later when the population gets bigger. The Argentinian love for odd coloring, for instance, meant that what was brought there was louder on average than the founders used in other countries. (Late nineteenth century literature is full of references to colored horses being bred for the Argentinian market.)

And the breeds where it has occurred aren’t as disparate as one might think. Breeds are more distinct from one another now, but they really were not as recently as 100 years ago. With the possible exception of the Arabian (and even that is open for debate), almost every Argentinian breed on record as having a manchado cannot rule out the use of local mares. At the turn of the last century, top-crossing – that is, the use of males to determine the “breed” designation – was the way things were done almost everywhere, and most certainly where horses of a specific type had to be imported. If a color was in the local mare population, and was not intentionally bred out, then it could spread pretty wide. That would be doubly so if the pattern was recessive.

And the individual horses we know of are not all unrelated. The  Hackney stallion that the pattern in the above illustration is based on is the grandson of one of the known manchado mares. Both have multiple lines to uniquely Argentinian horses. It would not be impossible to have a recessive pattern there in the native, pre-studbook population (perhaps already of Hackney descent) which then spread.

I think that is a more plausible explanation than something is making the horses odd-colored after conception. Here is the section on the color from Dr. Sponenberg’s Equine Color Genetics (Third Edition):

That pretty much sums up my suspicions on the color as well.

For those that might like to see more examples of the pattern, pictures of a manchado Polo Pony are here, and of course the famous Arabian Trabag can be seen here and here.

(I should clarify that when I say the horses can be traced to Argentinian horses, that is not to imply that the bloodlines used were somehow questionable in nature. Many of the breeds have a long history in the country and have separate founder lines from other countries.)

In the course of a discussion on an online forum, I had a request that I post pictures of this leucistic turkey vulture.  Leucism is the term for animals that have reduced pigmentation.  Some leucistic animals are partially unpigmented, much like we see with pinto horses, while others have reduced pigment.  In horses (and many other domestic animals) those genes are referred to as dilutions.

Sadie here has the second type, where her coloring is a paler version of the ordinary black of a turkey vulture.  Here is another picture of her taken in the shade, where it is a little easier to see that the color is diluted from black.  It has a similar tone that many black diluted horses have.

Sadie lives nearby at the Carolina Raptor Center.  Up until just recently, the center was also home to a leucistic raptor of the piebald variety.  That was Honeysuckle, a white Red-Tailed Hawk.  I never was able to get a good photo of Honeysuckle before she was sent to the Comanche Nation Ethno-ornithological Initiative (SIA), but here is a link with a wonderful shot of her.

Honeysuckle was interesting because the all-white coloring seen in that linked photo was the result of a progressive loss of pigment.  When she arrived at the Raptor Center, her coloring was not especially unusual.  She did have a few lighter feathers, but with each molt she acquired more white feathers until she was entirely white.  She is now part of the ongoing research on leucism in raptors at SIA.

And for those that would like to see better shots of Sadie – all I had with me that day was my Android phone, which doesn’t take distance shots well – there are some good ones here and here.  (The last linked photo has a very clear shot of her unusual gray-blue eyes.)

There is no question that the general level of understanding of horse color among horse people has risen considerably since I first got online in 1989.  Back then people were still offering old guides for determining whether or not a horse was a tobiano or an overo (“white does not cross the topline…”).  Today many breeders not only know there are many different kinds of overos – many of which do have white that crosses the topline – but can pretty accurately identify a frame or a splash or a sabino.

It is easy, then, to forget that there is still so much that we do not know.  I have spent the better part of a decade trying to convince horse lovers that color genetics is really pretty simple, and in many ways it is.  But there are still many unknowns.

Blue eyes and their relationship with the different patterning genes is one of those unknowns.  It is not uncommon to find online experts asserting that all horses with blue eyes are splashes or frames, and that absent a positive test for LWOS, a blue eye is proof of the presence of splash.  We don’t actually know that.  Are blue eyes characteristic of the splash overo pattern?  Undoubtedly.  Hunting down the splash pattern has been an obsession with me for decades now, and looking for consistent production of blue eyes over multiple generations was one of the ways I tracked down classic splash ‘crop-outs’.  Those were horses with this kind of classic splash patterning:

(Photo is of Dell Tera’s Long Term, owned by Travis Skaggs.  Thank you, Travis, for sharing him!)

But a clear link between a given trait and a specific pattern does not prove an absolute and exclusive relationship.  The fact that splashes consistently have blue eyes (and classic patterns like the one above seem to always have two blue eyes) does not mean that other patterns cannot have blue eyes, or that we might not one day also find a separate, unrelated gene for blue eyes.

We already know that some of the Dominant White mutations have had one or both eyes blue.  Likewise, a number of the sabino white Walking Horses (genetically homozygous for Sabino1) in the early stud books had blue eyes.  Were they all also splashes?  It seems doubtful, given the production records of the horses involved.  Most did not reproduce their own eye color, and none produced the kind of classic pattern pictured above. But it cannot, given what we don’t yet know, be proven one way or the other.  With luck, we will one day have a test and time will tell.

And finally, to tie back in with my off-topic posts about color in other animals, here is an example of a separate blue-eyed gene in dogs.

This was a German Shepherd mix from a recent horse show I attended.  There are several known causes for blue eyes in dogs, with the most common being the merle gene discussed in the previous post.  Often dog people will use the presence of blue eyes as a diagnostic for merle, since the pattern can be cryptic.  This little guy didn’t have any merling that I could find, so I suspect that he had the separate gene for blue eyes.  That is the cause for blue eyes in breeds like the Siberian Husky. The popularity of that breed, and most especially blue-eyed Huskies, has led to a rise in blue eyes in the American mixed breed population.

More recently, a spotting pattern in German Shepherds has appeared, and it also produces blue eyes.  It is rare that ordinary piebald dogs have blue eyes, though it can happen.  The dogs with this mutation (called “Panda” by researchers) seem to have an unusually high frequency of them compared to the traditional piebald pattern.

If dogs can have a gene for blue eyes independent of any patterning or dilution genes, it is worth considering the possibility in horses.   Likewise, if multiple patterns in dogs can produce blue eyes in varying frequency, there is no real reason to believe horses are different.  But the fact is that until we have more tests, and more information, there is still a bit of mystery to pattern identification.

Readers from the studio blog may recognize Emma as the animated image that appears beside my contact information.  She is my second merle dog, coming to us after I lost my blue merle Sheltie, Darby, to old age.  She probably won’t be the last, either.  I have a weakness for the color.

It’s another color pattern that crosses some unusual species lines.  Here is the same pattern in mice.

These mice were bred by Roland Fischer of Chilloutarea Mousery.  The pattern is also found in Llamas, where it is called “appaloosa”.  Some good examples in llamas can be seen on this page.

What is interesting about these different species is that while the appearance of the pattern is much the same, in each case the genes are quite different.  In dogs, for instance, merle only effects genetically black pigment.  Black and liver (and presumably dilute blue) have irregular areas of roaning, but red dogs that carry the pattern only show it when they have black hairs.  Here is a good example of that with a brindle dog, which is genetically red with black stripes, that has the merle gene as well.  The merle disrupted the striping pattern, but the red coat remains unchanged.  This is a dark sable, which is a genetically red with black shading, with the merle gene.  Notice how the front of the face, which is not shaded in a sable, is not merled at all.  (Unless the dog is heavily shaded, or the kind of merle that is densely patched like Emma, longhaired sable merles can be really hard to identify.)

In speaking to Mr. Fischer, it seems that the gene in mice is not tied to black, although it is the preferred color since it shows the pattern well.  Even more interesting, the pattern is recessive in mice.  With dogs, the pattern is incompletely dominant.  One copy of the gene gives a merle dog, while two copies produce a double-merle, which is sometimes called a lethal white.  That’s not a truly accurate term because the resulting dogs are not typically white (though they usually have far more white than a merle with one copy of the gene) nor are they non-viable.  Double-merles do have eye defects and a higher incidence of deafness.  At least one study has shown an increased incidence of deafness in all merles, though some have questioned that finding given that many merles are also carrying white patterning genes which have also been linked to hearing issues.  There is no similar association with eye or ear problems in merle mice.

This might seem unrelated to horse color, but it does illustrate the fact that very different genes with completely different mechanisms can produce colors and patterns that are visually the same.  That is true across species, and it is true within species as well.  The recent identification of Dominant White, which can look so much like Sabino1, should serve as a caution to those of us who identify color by phenotype.  Colors can look the same, yet have a very different cause.  As more and more tests become available, it is likely that we will find more look-alike cases.