Breeding for specific colors

In addition to sporting various patterns of white patches--the familiar tobiano, frame overo, sabino, or splashed white--every Paint Horse also has a background color. There are many background colors, and the genetic control of these is complicated. Anyone wishing to breed for specific background colors has an interesting challenge to combine specific colors with specific Paint spotting patterns.

Many Paint breeders prefer darker background colors, such as bay, chestnut and black, over the lighter colors such as dun, palomino, grullo or buckskin. This is because the contrast between the white Paint patterns and the darker base colors shows up better than with the lighter colors.

This rule, though, is not absolute, and the light-colored duns, grullos, buckskins and palominos are popular among some breeders. Taste in color is a very individual thing, and good horses come in a wide array of background colors.

While it is true that the control of color is complicated, it is also true that the lighter colors are all dominant to the darker ones. This is an oversimplification, but it works most of the time.

Simply put, the light colors do not pop out--except rarely--as surprises. That is, you have to breed to a light color to get a foal of a light color. This fact has some consequences for Paint breeders.

If the darker base colors are preferred, then it is important to always select the darker colors for breeding programs. This is especially so if outcrosses are sought, because the lighter colors are fairly common in the Quarter Horse. They are present, but rare, in the Thoroughbred.

On the other hand, if these light colors are desired, then it is important to always include at least one light-colored parent in matings in order to boost the chances of producing a light-colored foal.

The darker colors, usually considered to include bay, chestnut and black, are easier for most breeding programs. These have a peculiar interaction in that chestnut (and sorrel) are recessive to bay and black, but act to cover them up. This means that it is impossible to tell just from looking whether a chestnut horse has the genetic machinery to produce black or bay.

The relationship of black and bay is also that black is recessive to bay in most breeds. The only reliable way to produce black foals, then, is to use black parents. The problem with crossing these with bay is that the bay dominates, and even if a bay carries black, it will throw the black gene only half the time.

The problem with chestnut horses in a breeding program for black horses, is that most chestnuts have hidden the genetic machinery to produce bay. The result is that most black to chestnut crosses will produce bays as a frustrating, but logical, surprise.

For breeders set on producing black Paints, the only reliable approach is to cross black to black. Even then, the occasional chestnut or sorrel may be produced (and very rarely bay). These chestnuts and sorrels with two black parents, though, cannot be hiding bay, and therefore are useful in a breeding program for black horses. They will indeed produce blacks when crossed back onto a black horse.

To recap, the basic rules for the colors are that it usually takes at least one light parent to produce a light-colored foal. Dark colors also have a few general rules. Chestnut and sorrel, when mated to one another can produce only more chestnuts and sorrels. Bay mated to bay, black or chestnut/ sorrel can produce bay, chestnut, sorrel, and rarely, black.

Black mated to black produces black (or rarely chestnut or sorrel). Black mated to bay will usually produce a bay, fairly commonly produces chestnut or sorrel, and only rarely produces black. Black mated to chestnut will usually produce bay, but also chestnut or sorrel, and rarely, black.

The overriding principle is that color prediction is never 100 percent accurate. The best way to maximize the chance of a specific dark color is to mate two parents of that color. Any other approach drastically decreases the probability of achieving the desired color in the foal.

My APHA Plus, the association's subscription-based Web portal, features a Color Calculator. Based on genetics probability tables, this interactive application allows you to see coat color probability in several ways.

You can select a foal color and the Color Calculator will show you what the colors of the parents should be to result in the highest probability of having the foal come out dressed in the color you are expecting. Or, you can select either parent's color and then see what the color of the other parent should be in order to get a particular foal color.

Neither heterozygous or homozygous genetics, nor coat color patterns come into play with the Color Calulator. It is an entertaining, interactive way to determine the odds of, say, getting a sorrel foal if you breed two bays.

The My APHA Plus Web portal is a totally unique innovation and has no rivals in the stock horse world for the amount of information it delivers and its ease of use. Take a virtual tour of this latest in subscription services.

Color and type—an elusive combination>