Spots before the eyes

Knabstruppers, They’re Baroque-shaped (well, some of them are) and spotty. What’s not to like?

Having said that, I don’t have many of them – yet. In fact until recently I only had one – this old Britains Black Beauty which I repainted, and customised to have a permanent bridle. My main reason for painting her spotty was to try and ‘visually enhance’ her conformation a bit (!) Then, as a spotted horse with a ‘European’ body shape, I felt she’d do best as a Knabstrupper.  I named her Gilda as I had a vague idea it was a Danish name.

At the time I didn’t really know where to start in finding her a pedigree from European sources, so I turned to the members of IPABRA. Alice, the owner of All Hallows Equestrian Centre, was active there, and had a large sire and dam list of European breeds including the more obscure ones. They were all meticulously researched with pedigrees going back to real horses, so I felt very confident in asking her to recommend two of her models as parents. As the model was not noticeably one type or the other, we gave her one more ‘Baroque-type’ parent and one more ‘sport-type’. I admit she’s not the greatest model out there, but she’s recently been doing quite well in ridden classes.

However, I recently got another Knabstrupper, by a slightly roundabout route! About 2 years ago someone posted a ‘Pay It Forward’ challenge on Facebook. It ran something like this: ‘I promise to send something hand-made during 2011 to the first 5 people who comment on this status and then share it themselves’. I thought this was a great idea to catalyse me into the many creative projects I had in mind, so I signed up for it.

One of the people who signed up to receive something from me was a Swedish collector, so I offered to paint a horse for her, and we agreed on a Knabstrupper, her favourite breed. Someone else kindly donated a Stone Chips Andalusian for me to paint, and so (near the end of 2011, I have to admit!) I created this little guy and sent him off.

About a month ago, I was casually browsing around on MH$P (not something I do that often of late) and was very surprised to see a group of minis for sale including my spotty horse! It turned out that his owner had decided to get out of mini-scale models and had sold him on, only for his next owner to make the same decision. When I contacted her she was delighted to sell him to me, and I was very pleased to be able to welcome him home. As you can imagine, he took quite a lot of time and effort (see below!), and I’m glad that I’ll now have the chance to show and breed from him.

So, he needed a pedigree, and now there seems to be more Knabstrupper source material on the Internet than there used to be. For example, the Danish society website has a very good illustrated page of stallions at stud, with a lot of pedigree on each horse when you click on his picture. OK, it’s in Danish, but you don’t really need to be able to speak the language to look at a picture, read the pedigree, and work out that “Født” means ‘foaling date’. The British website also has a stallions page, although obviously there aren’t so many stallions over here. Nevertheless, it was from here that I ended up finding my stallion’s pedigree. Looking at the imported stallion Tornado af Knabstrup, I thought he looked quite similar to my model and was stated to be of Baroque type. His pedigree also looked interesting, as his website notes that he is ‘one of the very few Knabstruppers with 100% purebred status in 4th generation’. What this means is that, as outcrosses to various other breeds are allowed by the Knabstrupper registry, many registered Knabstruppers actually have parents, grandparents and so on, of other breeds. I believe this is becoming more and more common as the current market favours the sport-horse type, so breeds such as the Danish Warmblood, Trakehner, Frederiksborg and Oldenburg are being used. I like the idea of a stallion carrying the older Knabstrupper bloodlines, and as Tornado is still quite young, I decided that the simplest thing was to make my model a full brother to him.

He still needs a name, so I am playing with putting various words into Google Translate and seeing if I like the Danish version! I was going to go with one of the words for ‘magician’ or ‘wizard’, but then again, ‘orkan’ (hurricane) is nice and easy to remember (and to spell!) and is similar to Tornado, so I haven’t quite made my mind up yet.

Meanwhile there’s another horse in the pipeline… I was after a Chips Andy to repaint for quite a while and ended up getting several, by various means. One of them has had his head and neck turned to the left, which I really like, and I want to keep him as another stallion. As he stood there in his undercoat, I was convinced that he was asking to be buckskin blanket, which led me into a search as to whether the Cream dilution (responsible for buckskin) exists in Knabstruppers.

The consensus seems to be that it doesn’t, but that it is possible to introduce it via the permitted outcrosses. I found internet references to a buckskin colt bred this way who had existed in the UK for a while but unfortunately died young; furthermore I wasn’t quite sure whether his dam was of an approved breed or not. Another possible way to pedigree my horse might have been from the well-known Gestut Falkenhorst, putting a Knabstrupper mare to one of their dilute TB or Oldenburg stallions. 

Yet another way would have been to use Frederiksborg blood, as Cream is found in that breed. Lesli Kathman tipped me off about the fascinating Finnish site Sukuposti, where, in the Gallery, you can browse horses of a particular breed by using the ‘valitse rotu’ menu, and then see the pedigree of each by clicking on their photo and then their name. It is very good for some of the more obscure European breeds who might not appear elsewhere! This brought up a number of dilute Frederiksborg mares who could be used as a dam for my buckskin horse.

However, I’m now tending to move away from this idea, for two reasons. Firstly, a buckskin-based Knabstrupper would require documentation in the showring, setting out all the above justification for his colour. Secondly, any horse along these lines would be largely sporthorse or TB, whereas my horse is more the Baroque type. So I’m wondering if perhaps the horse is asking to be chestnut blanket? I really like the look of this fellow, so perhaps a son of his out of a spotted mare? Watch this space!

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.