More examples of appaloosa color shifting

I have been busy with work on the upcoming book, but I wanted to share some good examples of the color shifting found in some horses with the Leopard Complex (Lp) mutation. Appaloosa shows are less common than Paint shows in this area, so I was glad when one was scheduled for the Garrison Arena in nearby Clemson, South Carolina on a weekend that I was free to attend.

The mare above is a shade of warm pewter gray that is very common in appaloosas. I would expect her to test black (E_aa) and negative for dilutions, just as my mare does. What is interesting is that not all black appaloosas end up looking like this. At the same show, there was a jet black leopard. Just why the color shifts on some, but not all, is not yet known, though it does not seem necessary for there to be a true dilution gene present for it to occur.

The change in this guy is more subtle. He might be mistaken for a sun-faded black horse, but look closely at his lower legs. They do not look black, nor do they have the reddish or  yellowish tones that are more typical of sunburnt hair. Instead they have a dark chocolate tone. In my experience, that “off” color is even more noticeable in person – especially in natural light.

That brings me to the last horse. This mare may well be chestnut, but I would not be entirely surprised if she was in fact black-based. Her odd tone is present to an extent in this photo, but it was more obvious in person. She would certainly be an interesting one to test.

I would also add that all three of these horses are probably homozygous, and the last two images are good shots to show how homozygous horses have shell-colored hooves on their unmarked feet. My own mare is heterozygous, and as her images (linked above) show she is actually more diluted in color than the first two of these. Whatever causes the shifting, it does not seem to be influenced by whether or not the horse is homozygous for Lp.

(Clicking on the last two images will take you to larger versions.)

 

Leopard Complex (Lp) test now available

The official Leopard Complex test is now available for $25 from UC Davis. A paper detailing the causative mutation is expected in the near future. Congratulations to Sheila Archer, Dr. Rebecca Bellone and the Appaloosa Project on the discovery!

For more information on Leopard Complex, including some older posts that explain how it works together with patterning genes to produce the variety of appaloosa coat patterns, can be found by clicking on “Appaloosa” under the Categories menu to the right of this page.

 

Repigmentation spots

In the comments section of the last post, some posters noted the similarity of the white areas to fleabitten grey. That is not an uncommon thing with appaloosa patterns. Although it is easiest to think of the action of Leopard Complex (Lp) as a form of progressive roaning, where white hairs gradually replace the colored ones to form what American horsemen call varnish roan, in actual practice the process can go both directions. That is, it can add white hairs to lighten the coat, and it can add concentrated bits of color to speckle the coat. These darker hairs are sometimes called repigmented spots because they typically occur after the coat has already begun to roan out, or in an area that previously had white patterning.

The varnish roan mare at the top of this post is a very good example. I have run photos of Freckles before for the series of posts on appaloosa mottling. I have easy access to her, since she shares a pasture with my own appaloosa pony, Sprinkles. This particular image shows her coloring from four years ago, when the lightest parts of coat were an even mixture of white and color. At that time, had she not had such pronounced varnish markings on her body, and a sprinkling of dark spots on her hips, she might easily have been mistaken for a pale grey. (This particular photo was taken in early May, so she had not fully shed out for the summer and was just a shade or two darker than she would be in summer coat.)

Here is Freckles as she appears now.

Each year she has gotten more pronounced dark ticking in the roaned areas of her coat, even as she gets lighter in the areas that were colored. This lighter ticking is most noticeable if you compare the right hind leg in the two pictures. The repigmented specks first began to appear on her shoulder, but over time they have spread across most of her body.

This close-up of her topline shows just how closely this resembles fleabitten grey. In fact, if I use Photoshop to remove the hip spots and what remains of her varnish marks, the resemblance to a true fleabitten grey is quite striking.

I suspect some type of repigmenting is part of what was going on with the roaned areas on the horse in the previous post. With Freckles, the flecking ties visually with what is already going on with her coat, so it looks less jarring. With the horse from the previous post, the odd transitions between his colored areas and the patterned areas make him look a bit like you pasted together parts of a bay appaloosa and a fleabitten grey.

 

Unusual appaloosa

 

While searching through some old binders, I found some photographs of an unusual Appaloosa pattern. I apologize for the rather poor quality of the images, which were taken in a poorly lit arena using a traditional (non-digital) camera. I’ve tried to bump up the brightness without losing too much in the way of detail. Apparently the horse was never in the right position to get a good side shot, which is a shame.

He caught my eye because of how abruptly his coat transitioned to the dark areas of his pattern. Also unusual was how rounded the edges were. This is especially visible on his face and neck.

 

The other unusual aspect of his pattern was the “bleached edge” effect on some of the roaned areas. You can see one on the bridge of his nose, both in the picture above and this one from the front.

 

The above shot also shows how the roaned areas appear to “pool” around the dark parts of his legs. Dark leg marks like this are pretty common on appaloosas, but the nature of the roaning, which looks a lot like fleabiting on a grey, all in discreet areas (with those oddly rounded edges) while areas of relatively clear bay remain is quite odd. If this was an artistic representation, and not a real horse, I would have said the artist needed to work on more realistic transitions  on the legs.

 

On both the leg shots, the faintly whiter outline on the roan areas can be seen. The blanket pattern on his hindquarters, though, is pretty normal. I’ll include a close shot, since the spots show a really nice contrast between the two different types of halo-spotting. The darkest spots have halos that are made up of a mix of white and colored hairs, while the centers are colored. The centermost spot has a halo created by dark skin underneath white hair. The center of that spot is a mix of white and colored hair, though elsewhere there are spots that have dark skin halos and purely colored hair centers.

These photos are probably close to 15 years old now, and I never did learn the name of the horse. If anyone recognizes him, please drop me a note. I’d love to be able to look into his background.

 

More appaloosa color shifting

 

Nicole Jory shared a photo of her appaloosa pony, Jack, in the comments section of the post on snowflake patterns. I wanted to share him here because he is also a great example of color shifting on a bay appaloosa. His stockings hide it on the other three legs, but if you look closely at the left foreleg you can see the odd pewter color where the leg would normally be black. For some reason color shifting seems more common on black appaloosas than on bays, so I was happy to find such a good example.

He also has what I call an “occluding spot” over what would probably have been a bald face. Nicole suspected he was carrying a splash pattern, and I would tend to agree. Blue eyes and this type of face marking are very common in Appaloosas that trace back to Bright Eyes Brother, who is believed to have carried classic splash (SW1).

Jack will make a good jumping off point for the next set of posts about those occluding spots, which I hope to post later over the weekend.

 

Snowflakes and marbles

Before I move on to badger faces, I wanted to share another unusual appaloosa from Steph’s files. She took these pictures at the 2012 Midwest Horse Fair, and I apologize for my less-than-perfect color corrections on them. This particular horse seemed intent on staying in the shade, so I had to play with the settings quite a bit so that his pattern was more visible.

Appaloosas that develop clusters of white hairs are often called snowflake appaloosas. Appaloosas that have larger, overlapping clusters of white hairs are sometimes called marbled. Horses that inherit both varnish roan (Leopard complex, or Lp) and grey seem particularly prone to developing the marbled pattern, but it also occurs on non-greys like this horse. Appaloosas like this tend to stand out from other appaloosa roans because they look more blotchy and contrasted, as the picture of this guy among other appaloosas shows.

If you look closely, this guy looks to have some kind of lacy, spotted hip blanket in addition to the marbling. The marbling also extends down the tailhead in fairly distinct round spots, which I thought was interesting. Like the moldy spots on yesterday’s horse, the whole effect looks very layered, with the darkest spots sitting on the topmost “layer” of the coat.

The marbling was not evenly spread across the coat, but concentrated on the forehand and on the chest in particular. That is more noticeable in this shot.

In some ways those areas are reminiscent of type of patterns seen on horses with the white fungal markings. There are also horses that develop a similar pattern that is not thought to be related to the appaloosa patterns. You can find some of those, and some marbled appaloosas, on this Pintrest board.

Many appaloosas get some clustered spots of white as they roan. Here they are on the ears of my own near-leopard mare.

Around the same time she acquired white spots on her neck, chest and face, though those the existing roaning made them less noticeable than the ones on her ears.

It is not known why some appaloosas develop such an exaggerated version of this kind of clustered white spotting while most do not. Perhaps it is a modifier that redirects the roaning process, much like the Bend Or pattern appears to redirect the the sooty hairs into clusters on some horses. It is also possible that some of these horses may have some unrelated white spotting pattern, since breeders often assemble breeding groups that contain similar-looking colors that have a very different genetic cause.

 

Moldy spots

My friend Steph Michaud sent some pictures from the 2012 Minnesota Horse Expo, which included the really loud chestnut leopard DREA Chief Fireagle. He is a great example of what the leopard pattern looks like on a horse without markings. Appaloosas with white on the face and legs tend to have smaller spots with wider areas of white between them. This effect is sometimes called the Sabino Boost, because the sabino patterns appear to boost the amount of white in other patterns at the expense of the colored areas. Fireagle is particularly interesting because this type of loud patterning is more often seen on appaloosas with a bay or black base color than on those that are chestnut.

But I wanted to share the pictures because Fireagle has what are sometimes called “moldy spots”. Part of what makes the leopard pattern so desirable among appaloosa breeders is that unlike the other colored areas on an appaloosa, the spots do not roan out with age. A leopard is all spots, or nearly so, so the pattern does not change significantly over time. Leopards with moldy spots are the exception in that they develop random white dots inside some of their spots. The amount seems to vary, with some spots developing pinholes of white while others appear to roan out completely.

Because this is something that develops with age, it is sometimes mistaken for greying. Appaloosas that inherit the grey gene do lose their spots, but moldy spots are not caused by greying. Greying does other things to the appaloosa patterns which is worthy of a later post, but that will require tracking down some decent pictures. This, however, seems to be some variation on the normal actions of the Leopard Complex gene.

What I have always found interesting about moldy spots is that they highlight the separate nature of the clustered spots. Loud appaloosas have large patches of color that give the impression they were made by a number of individual spots that overlapped. Because only some of the spots develop “mold”, appaloosas with this trait show that the spots really are distinct entities. They may look like one large colored patch, but as far as the body is concerned they are truly layered. (This can be seen most clearly on Fireagle’s croup, where the different spots have faded in varying degrees.)

This ties in with the upcoming post about occluding spots and badger faces, which are other instances where colored areas behave like layers in a drawing. From there I’d like to get back to the discussion on Belton patterning with some of the images that have been sent to me since the initial post on that topic. That should also put things back on track for regular postings, so stay tuned!

 

Belton patterned horses

This is “Gump.” He’s a Paint Horse that shows here in the Carolinas, and is the horse that first had me wondering about the possibility of a dark ticking pattern that was separate from any of the white patterning genes. As you can see, he has quite pronounced spotting on his face much like one might expect to see on a leopard. The problem is that were he actually a leopard as well as an overo, those spots would replace his bay areas, not his white areas. (For those just joining the conversation, the two previous posts explain this in much more detail.) I suspect those familiar with leopard patterns would also recognize that there area around his mouth doesn’t look right for the appaloosa pattern, either. It is too “clean”, with the spots and the white very clearly defined. If you cover his face so that just his muzzle shows, he looks like a pinto with “kissy spots” and not a leopard appaloosa.

So he is just a pinto. Here is a side shot to show the rest of his pattern.

As this picture shows, he’s a frame overo. That white on the side of the neck and again on the side of the body are classic placements for that particular pattern. He probably also has one of the sabino patterns, since he has high stockings in the back. Frame does not typically add white to the legs, so frame horses with white legs are usually carrying something else in addition to frame. Since the various sabino patterns are widespread in riding horses, and especially in stock horses, it’s the most likely cause.

What struck me about Gump is that his pattern has a torn, angular look, which is quite different from his extremely round ticks.

There is spotting on his leg white, too, though I did not manage to position myself for the best lighting in this photo. Like the spots on his face, these are round even though the rest of his stocking goes up in ragged angles.

The character of the ticking and his pattern do not match.

That is particularly interesting to me, because most of the pinto patterns interact with one another. They don’t just overlap one pattern on top of the other. The presence of one tends to effect the appearance of the others. That overall influence gives most patterned horses a harmonious look. It also complicates matters for those of us interested in teasing apart and defining the different patterns, when the action of one mutation changes the actions of a second, unrelated mutation. Sheila Archer, of The Appaloosa Project, refers to this as patterns “talking” to one another. I have always liked that way of phrasing it, and would say that much of what I find most interesting about patterns these days revolves around those “conversations” between the patterns. The discordant patterns on Gump say that whatever is causing his ticking, it doesn’t seem to be “talking” to the rest of his patterning. That would at least suggest that it is something separate from whatever is causing his pinto pattern.

Gump sat in my “weird stuff” file for years, until last month, when a Facebook friend linked to this horse. When I first saw the image as a thumbnail, I assumed someone had found Gump. The ticking and even her base color is that similar! But that’s not Gump. That’s an Australian sport pony named Haley’s Comet.

Around the same time, another horse came to my attention. Her image was used on the header of the Paint Horse Connection, a quarterly newsletter that goes out to American Paint Horse Association members, and in an article in the Paint Horse Journal.

Like Gump, she is a frame overo, but without the sabino-type leg white. And like Gump, she has the spots that are very concentrated on her face, compared to the spots on her body. Because her body has broad areas of white patterning, it’s even more striking on her.

That was what made me think of the Belton pattern in English Setters. They sometimes have that same kind of larger, more concentrated spotting on the face compared to the body.

They aren’t all like that. One of the most interesting thing about the ticking (Belton) pattern in dogs is that it does have a lot of variation even within a single breed. But on a horse this kind of concentration on the face is quite unusual. Heavily concentrated dark ticking is odd in horses. Having it more pronounced on the face is stranger still.

You might notice that these horses all have a similar spotting arrangement, but that arrangement is rather different from Vision Morinda, the horse posted previously. Her ticking is more uniform, smaller and denser. It is hard to know, with so few horses like this, if these are variations on the same trait, or different things entirely. But having seen a handful of horses like this now, I know I’ll be looking at ticking more closely in the future. And certainly if any readers find horses with interesting spots inside markings or patterns that don’t fit what might be expected for a tobiano or one of the overos, please pass them along!

 

Leopards, Cat Tracks and Beltons (Part 2)

In the previous post, I talked about the two things that cause horses to have small dark spots on a white background. The first was the leopard pattern (Leopard Complex + Pattern1) and the second was the homozygous tobiano pattern. In this post, I want to talk about how dark spots on a white background are different in dogs.

Dalmatian dogs look like leopard appaloosas. It’s the same white background and the same small, round spots of color.  But Dalmatians are genetically very different from leopards. In fact, they have a lot more in common with the homozygous tobianos. That’s because they are “pinto” dogs. They just happen to be missing (or at least mostly missing) their dark patches. In fact, if you can imagine someone starting out with a classic tobiano horse – dark head, large round areas of color on the body – you have a good idea of what the basic piebald pattern is in dogs. In fact, in some countries the name for tobiano and the name for this pattern in dogs is the same: plating. Plattenscheck, platenbont – plate pinto. It makes sense, since tobianos have large “plates” of color on a white background. These dogs do, too. Or at least they started out that way. Here is a popular sire of English Setters from a little over a century ago.

His pattern is very reminiscent of tobiano. But breeders did not care for the patches, so they began breeding away from them.

In dogs, this kind of pattern is often called “extreme piebald”. It is still a “pinto” dog, but it doesn’t have a lot of color left, even on the face. English Setter breeders were not alone in this preference. The Dalmatian breeders were selecting for the same thing. They did not want patches, or even dark ears. They wanted all-over round spots.

Those round spots, which are visible in all three of these English Setters, look a lot like cat tracks to someone familiar with tobiano. What makes them different is that they aren’t actually part of the plating pattern. They are a separate thing entirely. For English Setters and some of the other sporting breeds, that’s the “Belton” pattern. The more technical names for it – ticking and roaning – are unfortunately for us horse people, already taken by very different patterns. So for now we’ll just use Belton to avoid making this any more confusing.

Belton adds dark spots of color to the areas the piebald pattern leaves white. What dog breeders have done is manipulate the scale and spacing of those spots of color. All three dogs at the top of this post have what are believed to be variations on this kind of patterning. The English Setter to the left is of course the original Belton pattern. The Dalmatian in the middle is likewise has a Belton-type pattern, but he also has some kind of modifier that has made the spots larger, rounder and more distinct. (Some of the distinctive nature of his spots are, of course, because he is a sleek-coated dog compared to the setter.)  The Australian Cattle Dog at the end has a Belton-type pattern that was modified to the other end of the spectrum, with spots that have gotten smaller, less round and less distinct. In some breeds, this is what is called Roan. There is some debate about whether Roan and Ticking in dogs are truly separate, or just variations on the same gene. I am not aware of any papers yet published with molecular studies, but it does seem that roan dogs, when outcrossed to non-roan breeds, end up with offspring that look a lot like the Belton setters. Certainly whether these are separate, similar genes or the same gene with layers of modifiers, the end result is that dogs have independent factors that will “recolor” the area that a piebald gene left white.

It didn’t seem that horses had that, at least not until recently.

In 2009 a French sport horse, Vision Morinda was foaled.

Clicking on the image above will take you to the website for her breeder, and her page which has many high-quality photos of her at all ages.

At first glance, it is tempting to assume that Vision Morinda is a tobiano with very loud cat tracking. The problem is that she cannot be homozygous. Her dam is brown. (Note that the mare she is pictured with is a surrogate. Her dam, Scarlett Fontanel, is pictured here.) But perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that her spotting seems to have intensified as she matured. That’s something that is typical of the Belton patterns. As most people are aware thanks to the Disney movie, Dalmatian puppies are born white and develop their spots later. That’s true of the English Setters and the Australian Cattle Dogs. Here is my friend Mary’s (extremely cute) Cattle Dog mix, Volt, as a puppy. (Thank you, Mary, for letting me share your photos!)

As you can see, he looks like a white dog with black patches. He is an extreme piebald. That’s why he has white ears. Well, mostly white ears. He was already starting to show some spotting there. His back and sides, however, looked white. But here is Volt today, as a grown dog.

As you can see, he developed his ticking – the Belton-type pattern – over time.

In a less dramatic fashion, Vision Morinda seems to have spotting that intensified as she matured. (Her breeders even comment on her page about the surprise of getting an English Setter color on their horse.) The spotting on her is also different, visually, from a typical tobiano with cat tracks. The pattern is evenly distributed. The spacing does change somewhat (notably across her shoulder) but it still is pretty consistent across the white areas, rather than clustering into spots or patches. It looks like the ticking you would see on a dog, not a horse.

This raises the question of whether there is some factor in horses that can add ticking – a Belton pattern, so to speak. I have a few more horses to share, all with odd spotting patterns. None are quite like Vision, but all have unexplained dark spots inside white patterns or markings. They all come from my “weird stuff” files. That’s where I put things that don’t make sense, or just seem “off” in some fashion. Sometimes enough of them accumulate – like the odd late greys from a few months ago – that it seems like there might be some thread connecting them all. I am not sure these horses really have a common thread, because they do have some visual differences, but I’m going to start posting them just to see if more turn up. That’s what happened with those greys (I have more that I need to post in the future, by the way!) so maybe sharing them will bring others out of the woodwork!

(Images at the top of the post are courtesy of Wikipedia. Images of historical English Setters come from The Pointer and Setter in America, published in 1911, and Country Life, Volume 22, 1907.)

 

Leopards, Cat Tracks and Beltons (Part 1)

Images of leopard appaloosas with Dalmatian dogs are always eye-catching. Certainly they can look quite closely matched, like this Polish Malopolski and his buddy. Even so, the patterns in the two species are very different in terms of what is really happening to the pigment on the animal. That’s probably off in the weeds for most owners and breeders, but for artists the distinction is actually pretty important.

This touches on one of the reasons why artists who develop an interest in horse color often have such a different perspective. Usually the kind of information a breeder needs is predictive. That is, they need to know what might likely result from crossing this to that, or what they might need to cross if this particular end result is what was wanted. What artists need to know isn’t about prediction nearly so much as it is about possibilities. Not so much what might happen, but what could happen – even far-out-there, not-very-likely, could happen. That’s because artists often want to add something for interest or for composition. For those producing realistic art, that has to be done within the constraints of what is possible. It doesn’t necessarily have to be likely, but it does have to be possible. This unique perspective became apparent to me a number of years ago when I gave my first presentation on horse color. In the question and answer period afterwards, someone in the audience asked if a horse could be both dappled and fleabitten at the same time. It was clear that was not the sort of question my fellow presenter, Dr. Sponenberg, often heard. But it is precisely the kind of question that equine artists ask all the time. Scientists might not notice this kind of detail on an individual horse, but for someone who paints horses, this kind of information – does this happen with this? – has a lot of practical value.

So why do artists need to understand the process behind appaloosa patterns? Spotting is a useful tool, because it breaks up positive and negative space. It makes the horse more visually interesting. If you are particularly clever, it can be used to draw the eye in a way that works with the composition, or to hide flaws. But spotting doesn’t just happen anywhere. It follows rules, and those rules depend with what is happening with the pigment. Understanding the underlying mechanism makes it far less likely that you’ll add some interesting detail that isn’t realistic. When dealing with rare combinations of colors and patterns, it might be difficult to find a reference image to consult. Knowing the process can tell you if there is a reason to bother looking in the first place, because it tells you what is possible. (And when you wing it without a reference, the knowledge will make for more reliable guesses.)

“Trouble”, sculpted by Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig and glazed by Lesli Kathman.
In the collection of Melissa Gaulding.

This is a ceramic collectible with the kind of spotting (often called cat tracking) seen in homozygous tobianos. It’s a really popular effect. In my normal job (the one I have when I am not trying to get a horse color book to press), I have produced quite a number of these. The problem comes when this gets confused with leopard spotting, and most especially what happens when leopard patterns are combined with the tobiano pattern. That brings us back to the image at the beginning of the post. These three images – the leopard, the Dalmatian, and my ceramic foal –  represent three very different scenarios in terms of the underlying process. I want to take each, one at a time, and explain how they are different despite looking so similar.

This is the typical nose-to-toes kind of leopard. Most people would think of this as a white horse with black spots that have been superimposed on top. That’s not really accurate. From a genetic standpoint, this kind of horse is a two-step process. First she has inherited a gene that progressively adds white hairs to the coat. Those hairs, over time, are going to produce the fairly distinctive pattern known as varnish roan. If the pony in my illustration just had that first gene, she would look like a black version of this pony.

That first gene, known as Leopard Complex, sets things up for leopard but it doesn’t make leopard patterns itself.

That happens when the horse inherits a separate patterning gene in addition to Leopard Complex. In this case, that patterning gene is called Pattern1. What Pattern1 does is take the white from Leopard Complex and amplifies and organizes it. So while our horse looks like she is white with spots, it is perhaps more helpful to think of her as a horse that was roan, but Pattern1 has now taken that mixture of white and dark hair  and reorganized it. Underneath the white hair, what that horse may look like is closer to this.

This is what the underlying skin looks like. She probably does have some truly white skin in the area where a blanket pattern would go. Pattern1 does amplify the white, after all. But under it all she isn’t really a white horse, at least not in the sense that most people would think of as true white. She is more like a roan horse that has been modified a bit. That’s why even nose-to-toes leopards have faces that are shaded much more like a grey than a cremello, because for the most part the face has dark skin, not pink skin. And that is why a pintaloosa looks like this:

The true white areas of the tobiano pattern cover over the appaloosa pattern. The spots from the leopard pattern don’t spread over onto the tobiano pattern because the process with Pattern1 isn’t “add dark spots to the white”, it is “organize the roan into spots.” So the spots don’t happen where the tobiano pattern already took all the roan away. Without the color there in the first place, Pattern1 has nothing to work with.

Of course, if we moved our tobiano pattern out a bit, encompassing more of the dark skin and butting it up close to the “blanket” skin, we could probably get something that looked a bit like the leopard spots migrated over some of the tobiano.

Even so, the spotting is still concentrated in such a way that shows it is an appaloosa pattern with a tobiano pattern layered over the top of it. The spots on the flanks might look like they are in the tobiano white, but really they are just in an area that was already white from the action of the Pattern1 gene. The action is still the same. The tobiano is there adding true, pink-skinned white on the horse, and underneath it Leopard Complex and Pattern1 are just doing their thing.

Even with the tobiano bumping up to the pink-skinned areas of the leopard pattern, it still looks different from the kind of spotting that comes from a horse having two copies of the tobiano gene.

This is a (presumably) homozygous tobiano with cat tracks. Whereas Leopard Complex is a roaning process that Pattern1 takes and organizes into the leopard pattern, this type of spotting is more like a not-entirely-successful attempt to add some more color to a horse that already has large patches of color. Unlike the existing spots, which are large and opaque, these new spots are small and vary in opacity. Some just come through in specks.

Cat tracking tends to cluster around the existing spots to some extent, almost as if these new spots want to occupy the same general area as the existing spots. This is quite different from the spotting on a leopard, which tends to be dispersed across the body.

The exception is the hooves. Tobianos with cat tracks often have a concentration of spots around the coronary band, often turning the hoof completely dark or nearly so.

There are spots on the legs, but typically they are not as numerous as the ones around the feet. The same is true for the face. This is the face that goes with these feet. He does have a few spots in his blaze, but they are not extensive.

So how is this different from the Dalmatian? Well he really is a white animal with colored spots added on top. In dogs, the gene for this is usually called Ticking, but since ticking means something different in horses, I am going to use the older English term for the pattern, which is belton. This post has run really long, so I’ll split that over into a second part. And why delve into the belton pattern in dogs? Because lately there has been a handful of horses that have turned up that just might have that kind of spotting. At the very least there are horses with dark spots inside their white markings that are not tobiano cat tracking and not leopard patterning. More on those will appear in the next post!