On This Page:

The Colors of the Oriental Strains

The photo at left shows a taboon of Turkomen mares in their steppe homeland. You can see just about every horse color in this herd, with blacks, bays, duns, buckskins, a cremllo or two, a single palomino, browns, chestnuts and greys. Many of these mares show the distinctive Turkoman glow.

Talking about colors of various breeds can become extremely confusing, as different languages have different names for different colors, markings, dilutions, pinto patterns, and combinations thereof. An example of the trouble one can get into using local color definitions is the confusion over the Linebacked Dun coloration which is the ancestral coloration of the Horse in all his forms.

The genetic Lineback Dun factor produces a very specific interference pattern in the coat of the horse and donkey. Body color is "diluted" due to the fact that pigment is restricted to more or less one side of the hair; the very tip of the hair is fully colored in a way which sometimes makes a Dun appear to be Sooty (see below) when in fact it isn't; there is a stripe down the back, which proceeds from between the ears, through the mane and along the spine and into the tail, of varying width depending upon the strength of the interference pattern; foals are born with zebra striping on the legs, and sometimes on other parts of the body, which may or may not be "overwritten" by point coloration as new coats grow in, again depending (apparently) upon the strength of the interference; the mane may be "two-toned" depending upon the width of the backstripe; there is often darkness on the withers, which may coalesce into a stripe; there is almost always a dark area on the bridge of the nose and the front of the face. Body color may range from a deep burnished gold to nearly ivory, depending upon a wide variety of factors.

Russian has two words which can describe the various kinds of dun: bulanaya and savrasaya, which are defined by Gurevich and Rogalev's Encyclopedia of Horse Breeding and Horse Sports as follows:

The definition of Bulanaya is almost useless to someone trying to determine exactly what color the horse is, in the same way the Jockey Club's definition of "dark bay or brown" is -- it covers an enormous amount of genetic ground, covering Linebacked Dun and Buckskin, either separately or in combination. On the other hand, Savrasaya denotes one specific combination of three different genes--Lineback Dun, Mealy and Sooty. In the large photo above, only one mare of the many duns visible could be classified as Savrasaya. Nevertheless, these are the terms used in the Akhal-Teke studbook, and of late, the Savrasaya designation has been dropped (the necessary combination of genes is rare in the Akhal-Teke, since the Mealy factor is rare in Tekes and the combination of Lineback Dun and Buckskin typically reduces zebra-striping to near invisibility in this breed).

In order to keep the confusion to a minimum, the color names used here are the currently (late 1998) accepted genetic color names as used in textbooks.

One of the many ways in which the directness of a breed's lineage back to its wild ancestors is a look at its color. Two factors are important in this assessment:

• Does the Lineback Dun coloration appear?
• Are there a great variety of colors within the breed?

Miscellaneous Interesting Things...

Cobwebbing

Cobwebbing starts as pea-sized white spots that appear along the spine on some horses. As the years go by, more spots appear, and the spots which are already there elongate into lines which themselves grow into a network. How or why cobwebbing develops is unknown. The cobwebbing shown is on the back of an Arabian mare, and two years ago were just a few small white dots on her croup. The cobwebbing goes all the way to her tail.

Equine Color Genetics, D. Phillip Sponenberg PhD, DVM.

The Authentic Arabian Horse and His Descendants, Lady Wentworth, 1945

 Encyclopedia of Horsebreeding and Equestrian Sport, Gurevich and Rogalev, 1991, ISBN # 5-260-00573-2 (in Russian)

How and Why the Horses Glow

The Turkmenian Horse often has a metallic glow to its coat, and it is a photograph of light-palomino Kambar which has been credited as having attracted many Westerners to the Akhal-Teke. The reason that the Turanian horse glows is that this horse has a hair structure more like that of a human than of other breeds or types of horse.

The core of a hair is an opaque mass somewhat like a miniature soufflé in texture, surrounded by a glass-like layer (depicted in golden yellow in the illustration at right) called the medulla. There is usually a "wash" or "tint" of color in the medulla.

In most horses, the hair's core is very wide, taking up most of the width of the hair itself. As a result, most of the shine one sees from the horse's coat is "topshine," or light which is reflected off the outer covering (the cuticle) of the hair. The apparent "depth" of a horse's color comes from light being reflected from the core.

Two factors contribute to the Turkoman strains' metallic glow:

In the Turkoman strains, the core is typically narrower than in other breeds, and the medulla wider. This gives more transparent area to the hair, which refracts and focuses light in much the same way as a crystal does. This structure is found whether or not the individual horse glows.

Additionally, in horses that glow, the core is often broken up into small pieces, separated from each other and the space left between them filled with medulla-material. This gives even more area to actually refract light through the hair, so that in cases such as that of Kambar, almost all the shine one actually sees is light refracted through the coat, rather than topshine.

Examination of hairs from many horses shows a clear relationship between the amount of "core breakup" and how much the horse will glow. In a "moderately glowing" Turkoman, about 20-30% of the length of the individual hairs will contain cores which are broken up into individual bits as in the photo at left. In a "strongly glowing" Turkoman, 60-90% of the total length of the hairs contain be with broken cores.

This phenomenon of hair structure is also seen in a particular color mutation called "Champagne," seen in Saddlebreds, Tennessee Walking Horses, Quarter Horses (photo at right) and other breeds. However, Champagne also produces other effects: the skin is lightened to pink or is softly mottled; the coat color is considerably lightened, and foal may be born with blue eyes which turn hazel as it ages. Blue eyes and pink skin are found in cremello or perlino Turkomans, but skin color is unchanged, and indeed, a strongly glowing Turkoman may appear a shade darker than a non-glowing horse of the same pigmentation would be.

Arabian horses, and some Thoroughbreds, show a slight amount of glow, almost equivalent to that of the "moderately glowing" Turkoman, due to the fact that the distal ends of their hairs, like those of the Turkoman, are completely clear.