Busy week

Last Sunday, my parents wanted to finally meet the ponies, so we headed up to the barn. Verdict?  Nobody died, nobody got stepped on, I didn't get squished because Cessa's pasture-mates have more manners than she does, and Justice is "at least as big as some of the horses you used to ride."  *snort*  Not horse people, my folks...

Saturday was a wedding, so barn day was Sunday instead.  And it was actually almost cool instead of... you know... Texas weather!

Ever get the feeling you're being followed? lol

And yes, he ran into me.  Oops.  We're gonna work on a verbal whoa cue there, I think, so maybe I can stop him running into stuff with his forehead (at least while I'm watching)...

His random ear spot has reappeared, too!

Best baby.

Apex selfie game.  It's all downhill from here, folks.

As for Cessa...  Well, someone was being a bitch because there was a new hay bale in the pasture.

This is the look I got when I told her so.

The hilarious part is that she let me catch her twice last weekend without a fuss, but this weekend?  Nope.  Not having it.  I wasn't even carrying a halter!  Mares!

At least the donkey wanted to see me.

Comparison shot: Justice's dam Love on the left, Cessa on the right.

One day...

One day I will learn to take my goofy selfies with the camera not pointed at the sun...

That day was not yesterday.

In other news, somebody has figured out back muscling and neck muscling and is starting to look more and more like a real horse.  So of course I only got a 3/4 view proof of this.  lol

Someone has also figured out that humans sometimes hide treats and that maybe if he puts his mouth on said humans, they will give him treats.

He seemed somewhat surprised when I kicked his butt for that little trick.

Also, a thing to file under weird shit the Appaloosa gene does: my horse has stripes.

I've seen LP horses with rib stripes before; it's really easy to mistake rib stripes for ribs standing out, though, so I don't tend to post photos of that when it shows up.  But this is on his spine.  He's also got lots of golden patches and lots of almost black patches; based on this year's shed, those golden patches are going to be white, probably when he sheds out for the winter.

It was too freaking hot to go chase down Cessa, so no fat bay mare photos this weekend.  :)

In other news, this is my next horsey project: organization.

It's not that I keep ALL of my horse stuff in the car. It's just that it takes me 10 minutes to unload what I do keep in there...

Oh baby

As I told my BOs: I distinctly remember buying a brown baby...

This is not brown.

This is a chocolate marble cake-colored horse.

I mean, he's cute (from some angles)... but he's not exactly brown...

Also, I'm pretty sure the Mane N Tail Spray-Away Horse Wash stuff is magic.  Used it when I bathed baby boy two weeks ago, and he is just... silky, despite the rain and mud that happened since then.  And I used it last fall on Cessa, and she stayed surprisingly soft-coated all winter.  It's a little awkward, because you're basically carrying around a small jug, and it sometimes takes a little extra effort to wash out the soap because it sprays it into their coats really well, but... uh... I'll take it?  Particularly at less than $15 and we've washed at least four horses with it now and we've barely made a dent in what's in the bottle.

Speaking of Cessa, she got some photo time too.  She is in raging heat right now, so she keeps coming to check on the boys.  I actually got a nice series of photos of her talking to one of the boys, but it wasn't until I got home that I discovered how interested he was in her.  Yeahhhh, I'm just... gonna leave off posting those on the internet... lol.

And last but not least, new baby is still stinking cute:

She's also officially silver black, which tells us who Daddy was.  Considering he was... uh... taupe as a baby, we're not sure how dark she'll end up.

And that's that question answered!

I don't have the final paperwork, but I do know what Justice's test results are now!

Everybody's LPlp!

Yup, somehow he missed out on getting LP from both sides of the family; he's just got one copy.  And to no one's surprise, he's patn/patn - just a plain old varnish roan.

Bath day for real!

Look who actually got a bath:

And he was very well-behaved for it - a little wiggly, and I could have done without the, "I don't want to circle right, so I'm going to step sideways into you over and over again," game, but for just shy of 2 years old and his first bath, I'll take it.  He even got his head wet, via spraying up in the air and letting it 'rain' on him, and was exceptionally good even when I accidentally managed to spray him full in the face.  (Oops!)

With his half-sisters.

His shoulders are whitening out now.  And hilariously, so is his butt!

Not gonna lie - I thought really hard about whether to share this picture. But honestly - the 'ribs' are actually drying winter hair curling; he looked like a Curly when I bathed him!  And he's at least trying to look a little less... Franken-baby.

I also bit the bullet and cut probably a foot and a bit off his tail.  I generally don't like cutting hair off of horses, but... uh... the 1980s called and wanted the rat-tail look back.  So when my BOs suggested taking the scissors to hair that was probably going to break off soon anyway... well.  Two snips at the bottom of the white that's grown in, and then I banded it up and brought it home, because it amused me.

They say you start to look like your animals after a while...

In other news, the BOs have a new baby!

She was right around 24 hours old in these pictures, so she's a little contracted and folded up still.  Hair's been sent off for genetic testing on her; both parents have LP and while mom there is a chestnut, dad is black, so it's... it's really anyone's guess what the hell color she is.

Little white hairs...

The last couple of weeks, I've been squinting at Justice's coat, trying to determine if what I'm seeing is dirt or white hair.

Well, apparently it depends on what bit I'm staring at.  Like this shoulder:

It's not mange, I swear.  lol It's white hair slowly growing in underneath the sun-bleached coat.

The current expectation of the barn owner is that he's headed for the bay version of this:

Borrowed from Drafts with Dots

I was thinking not - and then I found that white on his shoulder... lol

The babies are supposed to head back to the main barn this week, assuming the weather quits being quite so much spring in Texas.  (This weekend featured 80 degree temperatures and a hailstorm with hail up to almost 5 inches in diameter in places.  Ahahaha... hahaha... haha... ha... I hate spring.)  That means bigger pastures for them, and a better setup to see if maybe Justice just needs some dietary assistance to get out of the ugly duckling stage.  We had him on some grain that did a great job fattening him up over the winter - but as soon as we took him off of it, he shot up a couple of inches and started growing his spring coat, so we've lost ground on the Battle of Baby Franken-Horse again.

Horses: so noble... so majestic...

So... something, anyway.  lol

Spring is firmly here, and all the horses are itchy.  So I have a whole series of photos of Cessa getting ear scratches that are just hilarious.  That one's my favorite, though.

Justice got... half a bath, let's call it.  He's not the most reluctant of the babies to get hosed off loose in the pasture, but he's not thrilled about it either.  (One of his half-siblings is a hose hog, though, which was cracking us all up.  "Hose meeeeeee!")

He wasn't bad.  He just asked nicely if he could opt out by trying to walk away, and sighed quietly at me when I made him go back into the water.  And hey, there's something resembling a real horse under all that fur!

He really, really needs an actual bath, though.  I'm pretty sure the dirt in his coat is gathering dirt.

*sigh* And farewell, tail.  Yes, that's actually his tail hanging off the back there, and no, it's not that thin because it's wet.  It's just that thin.  It'll grow back - and undoubtedly when it does so, it will be all or mostly white, since it almost is already.  But in the meantime, hello appaloosa rat tail...

Legs

This is just hilarious to me.

Yes, those are long, white guard hairs on Justice's front legs.  The leg itself is brown.  He just... he just has these hairs sticking out like four inches longer than all the rest of his hair.

WTH, baby boy?  WTH.

This, on the other hand, is what looks like when someone has a scar because someone refuses to wear bandages on her foot and thus had a triangular cut heal stupid.

Normally all you can see is the bump there, but the vet trimmed the hair back so he could see what was going on.  She doesn't have a limp or anything; it's just funky cosmetic crap.  Ah well - not worth a few hundred dollars to make it look pretty, that's for sure!

Puddles and flowers and silver

I didn't go hang out with Cessa today because she was at the back of the freaking pasture and yesterday was crappy as hell, so my level of energy was low.

However, I did go see the little guy!  We stood in a puddle:

We were not impressed by the puddle. Try to walk around, sniff, step over.  He almost hopped once?  Then we stood in it.

We cataloged new white fur:

Funny jaw spot. It vanishes when he picks up his head, and it's not missing fur - it's actually white!

We joked with his breeder that she's not allowed to braid his tail anymore:

On the left: last week.  On the right: this week.  These photos don't do the change justice!

We explored the front pasture:

Hi, Justice!

With one of his year-mates - I swear I wasn't trying to hide him!

And wore flowers in our hair:

I can haz flower?

And most importantly, he reminded me very much of why he was a smart horse to buy.  Baby's got a good, calm mind.  Everybody else running around?  Meh, I guess I can trot.  Human flapping at him to get him to move away from something?  That means you're going to scratch my butt, right?  Walk down the driveway with just a human for company?  Sure, okay, can I eat more grass?

Spring is definitely going to be interesting!

So I walk up to Justice today, and I'm greeted with this:

This was two weeks ago:

Baby boy, you're kidding me.

AND your muzzle now looks mottled.

And as for your tail... L to R: normal view, pulling back the side hair, and braiding it.

You're gonna shed out mostly white, aren't you.

And he's now reached his first real baby phase, I think.  Turning right is currently not a thing he thinks he knows how to do.  Instead, he backs up three or four steps, then reluctantly turns as little as possible to go right.  It's all in slow motion, which makes it hilarious, and I don't really feel like I need to scold him for it yet - he turns eventually, and he does respond promptly.  Just... not quite in the right way.

Filling in

Not the best photo, between the shadows and the shave lines, but he's been an adventure to photograph.

Another cold weekend, complicated by various things (including a late night, a spousal stomach bug, and assorted other fun), meant I didn't get out to the barn.  Instead, have the above picture of a 10 month old Justice, in what is probably the one full-body photo I have of him from 2016 that isn't thoroughly embarrassing.  (Poor baby boy.  I keep thinking of the rule of thumb from the Chronicle of the Horse breeding subforum: three days, three months, and three years are the ages where you can best see what you've got.  Three days and three months?  Beautiful.  C'mon, three years...)

Instead, I figured I should probably explain what the heck I'm talking about when I talk about Justice's color and genetics.

I'm not going to go into color genetics right now, other than to note that I can make some basic assumptions about Justice's.  His father is a chestnut; his mother is a bay.  So I know his extension gene (the thing that determines if you start from a black or red base) and I know part of his agouti gene (the on/off switch for bay, only visible if your base is black).  He has to be Ee A?, because he's visibly bay!  I also feel pretty confident that he doesn't carry cream, dun, or grey; with all three, if you have one copy of the gene turned on, you're going to show it, no matter what base color you've got.  Neither parent is grey, neither has dun, and dad definitely isn't carrying cream, because he's chestnut and not palomino; while it's possible that mom could be a buckskin, she presents as a pretty classic dark bay.

I'm also not going to talk too much about the non-Appaloosa white patterns.  There are a metric butt-ton of them (from the classic paint tobiano, frame overo, and splash to the roans, rabicanos, and sabinos to the dominant white/white spotting, which depending on which one a horse has, what they look like).  If there's interest, let me know; I don't have a problem talking about them - the Ws are particularly fascinating to me - but for talking about Justice, none of it matters.  His registry says no tobiano, no frame, no dominant white, and no to certain types of splash; dad's been tested and carries none of it, and while it's possible that mom might carry one of the ones that likes to hide (frame, for instance), she wasn't required to test.  So we can assume he has none of them.

These two are great examples of classic tobiano.

Classic frame, with the addition of a bald face and some leg markings.

Pretty sure this guy is either splash+sabino or splash+dominant white.

Instead, I'm going to talk about the two parts of the Appaloosa genetic shenanigans.  Part one is what's referred to as the Leopard Complex gene (or LP).  Part two is the PATN genes, the ones that actually dictate the pattern.

LP is an off-on-REALLY ON switch.  If both copies are off, you've got a solid horse.  It doesn't matter what PATN genes the horse might have; they're never going to show, because the thing that activates them is LP.

Hmm, this example looks familiar...  Cessa is known to carry at least one PATN gene, but has no LP - so nothing shows.

If one copy of the LP gene is turned on, then the PATN genes can start to show.  That's when you can get patterns with lots of spots, big or small.  That's when the mottled skin, white sclera around the eye, and striped hooves show up.

Cessa's 2015 foal, Reign of Stars - one copy of LP, and at least one PATN gene. Also Justice's half-sister!

If both copies of the LP gene are turned on, then three things happen.  The PATN gene will show, of course - but the spots vanish or almost vanish, leaving vast white territory.  And the horse will be night-blind.  Horses with both copies of the LP gene turned on produce what's commonly referred to as fewspots - the fully white Apps and the ones with white blankets with no spots on them.

One of the horses at the barn - LP/LP with a heck of a blanket.

The PATN genes are where most of the research into Appaloosa genetics is concentrated right now.  They know that no PATN genes means a horse that can only display Appaloosa roaning (aka varnish roan).  Varnish roan can look very similar to classic roan, but it has one very specific characteristic aside from the Appaloosa stuff (striped hooves, etc): they tend to retain dark areas over prominent bones.

Like Justice's daddy here

And the roaning isn't just limited to horses with no PATN, although it's only called varnish roan when there aren't any other patterns.  Any horse with LP can roan in the non-patterned areas of the coat.

Some horses roan quickly; some don't.  I know one LP/lp individual who is creeping up on 10 and has a few roan patches - and that's it.  On the other hand, Reign looks like she means to shed out almost pure white this spring - and she's only a couple of months older than Justice.

Research has also shown that PATN1 controls large areas of white patterning that cover 60-100% of the body.  Most leopards will have PATN1.  PATN1 is the first (and at this time the only) pattern gene available for public testing.

All the other patterns seem to be built via multiple different PATN genes, very few of which have been identified. For example, they know that PATN2 is related to the blanket pattern, but it's not a strict 1 to 1 relationship; the size and shape seem to be determined by other PATN genes, so a horse with a spectacular, large blanket may or may not pass it down.

Most of the research about LP and the PATN genes is coming out of The Appaloosa Project, and they're still working to understand it.  Any mangling here is totally my fault.  :)

Now, all that explained... when I natter on about this little face:

And what he's got going on with his LP, I've got some thought processes going on:

1. I know dad was tested as LP/lp.  I know mom is the daughter of a Percheron and an Appaloosa, and I know she shows the characteristics of having LP, so she can only be LP/lp.
2. I know mom doesn't have any PATN; aside from her random traveling spot, she doesn't have any white at all.
3. My best guess at dad's pattern is that he's got a blanket.  He's pretty thoroughly roaned out, but he's got spots in roughly the right area for a blanket and two of his three foals bred at the farm have blankets.
4. I know Justice has at least one copy of LP, from one of his parents, because he's got those Appaloosa characteristics.  Based on #1, that means he can only be LP/lp (2 in 3 chance) or LP/LP (1 in 3 chance).
5. If you've got LP and a PATN gene, chances are you're going to see it before the foal is weaned, if not at birth.  Every LP baby I've ever seen, if they had a pattern, it was there at birth or shortly thereafter.  Justice came out brown, continued to be brown through weaning, and honestly didn't show anything but brown until last spring.  So I'm willing to bet he's a varnish roan.

Since I don't plan to breed him (brain surgery this spring!), my wanting to know if he's got one LP or two is about half curiosity; the color of future generations does not depend on this.  It's fascinating that he's throwing out roan spots while his mother stays pretty much solid, because it implies that he's got something she doesn't - and it sure doesn't seem to be a PATN gene.

On the other hand, it is actually kind of important to know if he's night-blind.  Two copies of LP turned on and night-blindness are inextricably linked.  You can't separate them.  You got one, you got the other.  Not that I'm likely to go night riding any time soon, but it will affect how I approach taking him in and out of barns and trailers, and it will affect boarding if I should need to move him from where he is now.