As we all know the chestnut gene is recessive, if you breed a chestnut mare to a chestnut stallion, you can only get a chestnut foal. You may find the resulting foal to have a flaxen mane or tail or both. This is a flaxen chestnut and NOT a palomino as may be first thought. When this occurs it is the result of the flaxen modifier. The flaxen modifier causes the mane and tail to lighten to a cream or golden color. The flaxen modifier only affects horses with red-based genetic make up (sorrel, chestnut, red dun).

The sooty or smutty modifier works on both red and black base colours. It works by darkening either particular areas of the horses coat, or the entire coat making it difficult to decern the real colour of the horse. The head, shooulders/neck area and hind quarter are serceptable to the sooty markings. Counter shading displayed as a sooty stripe along the backbone is often confused with the dorsal stripe of a dun horse. This does not indicate that the horse carries the gene for dun, it must carry other dun factors such as leg barring and have at least one parent that carries the dun gene.

If your horse has shading around its muzzle, for example light, cream-colored hair on a sorrel horse, or brown on a dark bay, it’s called mealy. The shading usually also occurs around the underside, such as the elbows, flanks and buttocks of the horse.

Dapples are expressed by a network of light and dark spots with round centers concentrated on the barrel and rump. Dapples are found on horses of all colours and are usually indicative of excellent nutrition and physical fitness, or in mares it can be a sign of pregnancy. The dapples can vary significantly over years and seasons.