might be as affective (or more) than treats

Now for the TLDR section of the comment added as a comment!…… I was a child when my mare was born and between her already losing her colour in the couple of photos of her as a foal/youngster and the fact she had the dun gene (bay dun and black dun can look very similar when mixed with grey hairs), I wasn’t 100% sure what her true colour was before she started going grey, so last year I had a few of her hairs sent off for DNA colour testing. I was already pretty sure she’d be homozygous grey, because both her parents had also greyed very quickly, like she had done and the results confirmed that she was indeed homozygous for the grey modifier gene. She was also homozygous for the Dun modifier gene, which is the gene that gives some horses a dorsal stripe along their spine and occasionally zebra stripes on the legs (unfortunately the grey gene turns those markings white too). Now for her base colour she’s Homozygous Black, but because she also carries the Agouti gene, which is the gene that turns the black base into Bay, so this means she was originally a Bay Dun, which in highland ponies is called Yellow Dun! If I was to breed my girl, her foals would be guaranteed to be either black dun (Grullo/Mouse dun) or bay dun (zebra dun/Yellow dun), and would eventually turn grey, no matter what colour the sire used (although sire could add other modifiers like the silver or cream genes). My girl’s too old to carry her a foal for herself now, but if I can find someone with a couple of empty mares to help attempt embryo transfer, I really hope I can put her either to a silver bay dun or chestnut stallion, with no grey gene, so the foal has a 50% chance of producing foals that don’t lose their Colour and a chance of those 2nd generation foals being silver bay dun or maybe even chestnut, depending on what genetics the other parent has! Sadly due to her age the chances of her having any viable eggs are pretty slim even if I can find someone to help, but it’s been very fun to look into her colour genetics and it’s amazing that we live in a time that we can easily and affordably DNA test horses to see their genetics and use the results to make picking the right stallion to work out the potential colour combinations possible, before actually breeding 2 horses together. This does sound a little superficial, but I personally would never breed my girl to a stallion that carries the grey gene, because homozygous grey horses are at a really high risk of developing sarcoidos, which are essentially skin tumours, so I’d want to ensure any foal would only be heterozygous grey. DNA testing can also be used to see if horses are carriers for certain health conditions too, so it’s a really handy thing to have available, when the health of the foal is just as important to you, as the conformation, movement/speed/endurance/strength etc, height and colour.

Also you can see in this short, that the foal already has grey hairs appearing on its face, ears and legs, then in the clips of it as an older horse, it’s still not pure grey/white, having a dappled pattern, which is very common in horses still in the process of going grey.

Grey horses are usually born black or brown.

Not the same horse at all.

@@patriciaotoole6508yes it is… the forehead markings match- you just don’t know anything about horses colors and how they shed out from blk or brown to grey as an adult.