erhrdt3 wrote:Hi Jorge and Sunday Silence, I wonder where the black came from in this horse? I wish they would have put up a photo for us to see him. I see in his pedigree the first black horse goes all the way back to Kris S. but there are alot of bays, chestnuts and greys.
The bays are actually black with a modifying gene (called Agouti), and the grays might have the gene for black but the grey gene causes the pigment producing cells to stop producing pigment early.
The reason there are more bays than blacks is that the gene that causes bay (it restricts the black color to the legs, mane & tail), is a dominant gene. That means that a horse only needs one copy to be bay, but needs two copies of the recessive, non-bay gene to be black.
And if you mate a black and chestnut, you might get bay because the bay gene only acts on the black color, so chestnuts can carry the gene without showing any evidence.
Gray is a dominant gene, so you only need one copy of the gene to get a gray, no matter what color coat the horse started with.
Does this help?