Читать книгу Horse Economics - Vera Kurskaya - Страница 29

Palominos are horses with chestnut base color, carrying one Cream Dilution allele. They appear bright pale yellow with white mane and tail (Photo 21). The skin is dark gray, although it can be somewhat brighter than the skin in chestnut horses, and the hooves are pigmented. Palomino eyes are typically brown color and only rarely hazel or amber. Eyelashes are yellow or light red.

In palominos the hair has a light red color with the characteristic cream tone, but the determination of shades requires practice. Dark palominos have saturated honey-red color and can be mistaken for chestnuts with flaxen manes and tails. Light palominos are characterized by a sandy colored body, and the mane and tail are practically always white (Photo 22). Sometimes a palomino can be so light that you mistake him for a cremello, but the main difference is the pigmented skin (see p. 20).

There is a special version of light palominos with sooty countershading. Such horses show a significant admixture of dark brown hair concentrated along the spine and extending downward to the sides. Bright, contrasting, yellow dapples and admixture of dark hair in the mane and the tail are frequently present (Photo 23). From a distance, some of these horses appear dirty yellow. This shade is so unique that in Australia it has its own name: lemonsilla. In other places it is common to designate such horses simply as dark palominos. The extremely rare countershading against the light background is expressed so strongly that such horses look practically completely dark brown, and the mane and tail have a significant admixture of brown and dark yellow hair, or they can be almost completely dark brown. This horse can be erroneously labeled “brown,” and a precise color identification is, in such cases, possible only through DNA tests (or less reliably by pedigree analysis). It should be noted that many palomino horses noticeably change color tone according to the season.

Palomino foals are usually born very light cream or almost white-colored, sometimes with pink skin, which becomes darker in the course of time.

Palomino color is commonly found in the Quarter Horse, Akhal-Teke, Lusitano, Kinsky, and Byelorussian Harness Horse, but rarely in the Thoroughbred, among others. In spite of wide belief, this color is not characteristic for heavy draft horses of European and Russian origin; those registered as palomino are usually, in reality, light chestnuts.