Also called palouse or spotted.
The appaloosa gene causes areas of white to cover the true colour of the horse, leaving spots of the original colour behind. The amount of white varies on every horse.
The appaloosa colour has 4 distinct characteristics :
- spotting over the horses body,
- stripy hooves,
- mottled skin around the eyes, mouth and genitals and
- in many you can see more of the white around the eye - called "Scelera".
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Spotting The amount of spotting in
the coat may be a few
"snowflakes" across the rump or may be so extreme the most of the
horses body colour is covered, with only a couple of spots over the body.
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Scelera All horses have
scelera and all horses can roll their eyes to show more of it then
"normal", but the appaloosa usually has more and it is very white
and obvious all the time.
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Striped hooves
Although many appaloosa coloured horses and ponies have vertical stripes on
their hooves, this can also be found in some other colours/patterns and
should not be used as a sole indicator of a appaloosa horse.
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mottled skin (or
Parti-coloured skin)
It is basically a pattern of pink skin and black skin... other colours such as Champagne have skin patterns,
but they do not look like that of the appaloosa.
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Often horses with appaloosa parents but no appaloosa colouring get the skin mottling and striped hooves, and are labelled as having appy (or palouse) characteristics.
It seems to be the common impression among serious appaloosa breeders that horses with very minimal spots or just scelera and/or hoof stripes RARELY throw appaloosa colouring to their offspring, many have experienced that the louder the colour, the better the chance of coloured offspring.
An appaloosa foal's coat may change dramatically from birth to maturity, blankets tend to get larger, roaning tends to extend and more spots may come through.
Appaloosa come in various different patterns, all of which are displayed to varying degrees on individual horses, as with other white patterns, some horses will show more colour then others.
While the different appaloosa patterns have been identified, breeding with one pattern does not guarantee which pattern (if any) will result... as an example see the first filly on the blanket page. - a blanket filly who's appaloosa gene came from a varnish sire.
To view the different patterns of appaloosa, use the example links on the right.
>> Top of page
 Introduction |
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Base Colours
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Modifiers
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Dilutions
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Patterns
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Contributors
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Examples
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Angela Peake
from
Serendipity
Farm
has kindly been in contact with Gene Carr who breeds Appaloosas
in America and lectures on the genetics of Appaloosa horses world wide.
He has offered to respond
to any appy based questions you may have:
his email address is
his
website address, which includes articles on appy genetics is:
www.dailypost.com/~santee/