Back in the days of no Google and fewer original finish choices, grey foals were kind of a problem.
This little guy had a reasonably successful photo show career, but every now and then we ran into a judge who insisted that "foals don't come in grey."
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| One of many, all of them unattributed. Sorry. |
It's 2022. I've long since moved past this... Or have I? About a month ago, Fabian and I attended the Irish Draught Horse Society of North America's (IDHSNA) SouthWest Inspection at White Dog Farm in Boulder, Colorado.
During lunch break, we were asked if we'd like to go see the foals.
Of course, we said yes.
Still, I spotted him right away.
Even though I have an entire reference folder of better examples, I couldn't resist taking multiple pictures. Old habits die hard. You can never have too many greybies!
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Very nice blog :)
ReplyDeleteI've seen Saddlebreds from one line grey out in the first few months. Practically born grey. Of course, a lot of them were improperly registered as roan. I think in many cases, a strong dose of Sabino helped the process along.
ReplyDeleteTo chime in from the perspective of someone who worked on thoroughbred nurseries for years, those judges were somewhat correct in that almost no foals are born grey. They failed to account for the age of the foal versus a single or double inheritance of the grey gene. Most of Breyers vintage foal models were larger in size, thus age compared to their traditional models, allowing more than enough time for the grey gene to kick in for an early weanling as most vintage Breyer foals look like to me. There is another caveat to grey foals, at least with thoroughbreds. Foals born with black genes can be born with a blue grey foal coat. I cannot say if this holds with black coated members of other breeds. Black genes in thoroughbreds are rather uncommon, so it isn't surprising that your average judge wouldn't know that and even if they did I don't know that I've ever seen a Breyer foal, vintage or otherwise that is the correct color of grey to pull off that explanation. In all my time on nurseries I saw it exactly twice. Wish I could offer photo validation but that was presmartphone era and thoroughbred farms are very squirrely about employees taking photos. It'd be even more difficult to document because any time spent outdoors under the sun begins to bleach the foal coat, making it reddish.
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