Hi ho silver!

You may remember that my first post on this blog mentioned the Brownbread Highland Stud, whose Open Day I thoroughly enjoyed a few years ago. In July I was able to arrange another visit, this time with my friends Keren and Carra. Carra in particular loves Highlands and had never had the chance to see a live one in the United States. Brownbread no longer holds open days but is happy to arrange private visits. We were very grateful to Mrs Dinty Steains for taking the time to receive us and show us her ponies, even though she had only come home from hospital the day before. As with so many stud visits we were plied with cups of tea, introduced to all the equine and other livestock, and generally made very welcome.

At Brownbread we were able to see some of the more unusual colours within the Highland breed, so I’m going to make those the focus of this blog post. Grey and yellow dun are of course the stereotypical colours of the Highland, but there is more to the breed than that. Since yellow dun is the result of the Dun dilution gene on bay, bays are also found, as are blacks and their dun dilution, which in the UK is known as mouse dun. In the USA and general colour genetics discussion it is usually known by its Spanish name of grulla.

I want to pause here to make a comment about the common depiction of mouse dun/grulla by model horse artists. It’s not a colour that most people in the UK see very often in real life, as it’s only really found in Highlands and Shetlands, and so artists are not very familiar with it. As it is a dun dilution of black, it would be reasonable to suppose that the black body colour dilutes to a grey, blue or lilac shade, and this is how I’ve sometimes seen it depicted on models. However I have never seen a live pony of this shade – the mouse duns I have seen have all been some shade of what I would call coffee-coloured, i.e a dull brown, although how light or dark varies considerably. This is a poor quality old photo but it quite nicely illustrates the extremes, as both these ponies are mouse dun:

Here’s a better photo (of a 20-year-old brood mare) to show the colour in more detail:

 

And here’s the colour in a Shetland:

It may be that in other breeds, perhaps Quarter Horses, Mustangs and so on, the gene is sometimes expressed differently, but I would encourage all artists painting models of British ponies to study the way the real ones actually look. I have plenty of photos which I am happy to send as reference!

The Brownbread Stud specialises in ponies from the Rum or Western Isles lines, which are the only ones to carry the Silver  or ‘silver dapple’ dilution gene. Those unfamiliar with this gene can read about it and how it works here. Silver is relatively unknown amongst real horse breeders – even many of those who breed it do not recognise what it is – and so ponies carrying the gene are often described and registered as ‘chestnut’ of various shades. However, once one is familiar with silver, it is usually easier to identify.

At Brownbread we were fortunate to be able to see examples of how silver changes all of the regular Highland colours. Here’s what’s often thought of as the ‘classic’ silver colouration: silver diluting a black:

This is the mare Rhum Mary V and here’s a particularly dark example, Claymore Harlequin:

 

Here is Brownbread Honeysuckle, who is a bay silver: 

 

You can see that the silver gene has diluted the black in her mane and tail, and to some extent her lower legs, but these are still darker than one would expect to find on a chestnut.

Here are some mouse dun silvers. Again the range can be from quite dark (deceased stallion Claymore Ben-y-Hone):

 To very light (Claymore Cathy):

And here’s are some yellow dun silvers, mare Claymore Caitlin:

and two year old gelding Brownbread Marmalade:

Be careful, though, not to assume that any Highland with some blond hair in its mane or tail is a silver. It’s very characteristic of the breed that the mane and tails of duns carry light ‘frosting’ on either side of the dark dorsal stripe.

A matter which has exercised me for several years is the question of whether true chestnut actually appears in Highlands, since most of the so-called chestnuts are actually the product of the silver gene, as seen above. This visit to Brownbread was my first chance to see a genuine chestnut Highland, the mare Mhairi Rose of Lonmay:

As you can see, she was not overflowing with Highland type, as Mrs Steains was the first to admit, and it would be easy to assume that perhaps in fact she was a partbred. However, I feel inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, for two reasons. Firstly, I have come across a few example of a first-cross Highland partbred being chestnut, and if this is possible, the breed must carry chestnut and be theoretically capable of producing the colour. Secondly, I have seen a photo of the stallion Birchwood Goldcrest, in which he appears to be to be a true red dun (chestnut with the dun gene). This leads me to conclude that the chestnut gene is lurking within the Highland gene pool, but that the dominant black-based colours are so prevalent there that it very rarely has the chance to show itself.

I'll end with this photo taken by Carra of Mhairi Rose and Honeysuckle side by side, which gives a good opportunity to compare and contrast a bay silver with a true chestnut:  

Clicking on any of the photos will make them bigger.