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Topic: Grey Stallions (Read 5138 times)
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Khataan
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Posts: 20
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I recently read on another BB that greys are not as popular. Do you all consider greys to be a second or third choice? 
I have a very nice stallion prospect that will be grey ( not flea-bitten), is this a bad thing? Should I even bother? It seems to me that most people here are not really interested in ATA stallions except for a few.
Please, I would like to discuss this.
Thanks,
Melissa
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guest
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Hi Melissa,
Yes, unfortunately there is a majority bias agains grays. This could be due to several reasons - they seem to have a harder time with the sun, etc. These may be old wive's tales, but you know how that goes. BUT, there are those that absolutely love grays and shop specifically for that color.
And yes, there is quite the discussion on importing semen vs. domestic stallions - as you've obviously been reading. If you have a stallion prospect, do not be hindered by this trend. Go ahead and have your boy inspected - there can never be too many nice stallions, in my opinion. And as an addendum, let me suggest that you concentrate on your horse's competition career, rather than focusing on his value in breeding only. It can be heart-breaking and frustrating to jump in on the whirlwind of harvesting mare owners for your stallion. Just remember that YOU know what you've got, and maybe by putting his show career as the priority, you can avoid all the other "noise". Germany is a whole different world in breeding, and importing semen can be big business for some. Let your boy prove himself in competition, and then, I suppose, the mare owners will come. Hope to see you at an inspection in the next year or two!!!
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Boss Mare
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Hey, just a note: If you post as a "Guest" because the software won't keep you logged in, put your name on your post instead of just putting "Guest"!! 
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Maren
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The Bouncer
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This "grey" matter is one of big discussions here too. I don't understand that, for me, a good horse has no color. But I know that grey and chestnuts in the Trak breed have a harder time. The Holsteiners in Germany are even worse, they really consider chestnut a totally undesired color and you will hardly find a chestnut stallion approved with premium title or winning for this very reason. Hannoer on the other hand, has a lot of chestnut with Weltmeyer, and they seem to do very well with that!
It is exactly like Ingrid said: black or dark bay is the most favourable color. But if I were you, I would never even think about gelding a prospect just because he doesn't have the color. A steel grey can be unusually pretty too, that's what we should keep in mind.
I remember Induc being the crowd's favourite in NMS and he was indeed the prettiest grey thing, with two totally black eyes, like a little teddy bear, VERY cute!
Where would we be without the "grey outsiders" Abdullah, Marduc, Falke, Etong, Maharadscha etc etc?
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Janet
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Oh, the gray thing again! I just know I wouldn't trade our gray Trak/Old mare for the world! Reserve Champion at The Breeders Classic?? ... high score of 81.00 in her career?? .... don't think I'll change, thanks! She'll go on to FEI after her foal this year and yes, it'll probably be another gray; black, maybe, but I doubt it! Gray's just fine in my book.
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Khataan
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Well, I feel alot better...
I am really glad that this board is around! I will have alot of questions in the future and I feel secure asking all you Trak people. I am new to the Trak world and I am looking forward to contributing.
My horse will definitely be concentrating on performance, and if he gets approved, well all the better . I love working with stallions and really hope does well enough to become a marketable stallion. So, you will all see me next year!
Thanks,
Melissa
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Navar
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I agree, there is no such thing as a good horse of a bad color. My personal preferences are GREY AND CHESTNUT. Black doesn't stay black unless you keep the poor horse covered or confined all summer. Some bays with the lighter fawn color around their muzzles look like mules in winter, very cute or big elegant mules mind you, but the resemblance is there. Dark bays in summer usually turn rather dunnish. Of course, I am in Georgia and our summers here are pretty intense, but not that different from many parts of the country. I generally could not care less about color as long as the horse meets my criteria. Yes, grey horses are more susceptible to melanoma and keeping them turned out during the summer in a pasture without much shade will encourage the condition. A veterinarian I was speaking with over the purchase of a mare in Michigan told me that ALL grey horses will eventually develop melanoma, but it is usually something else that causes their demise even in old age. It certainly would not stop me from considering a grey though. I think the grey white horses look particularly elegant and ethereal. There was an incredibly beautiful gelding by Erzsand at Valhalla Farm someone was working one more practicing piaffe and passage who just took my breath away. Schonfeld is another big, handsome grey I adore! - Karen Webb
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Michelle
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Hi,
I'm with Navar, I love greys and chestnuts too.  I really don't understand people who will turn a horse down because of its colour. Hearteningly not all greys get melanoma, there are some bloodlines that don't get it although this is rare. I think the research was done on TB's. I have a 9yo (not a Trak) and when she was inspected this year for her grading the vet commented that she was the first 9yo in years he had seen without melanoma. I just hope she stays that way.
Fortunately when a horse gets in front of the judges they don't have any colour prejudice, it is just some buyers. In the UK (where I am) most people don't want a chestnut and a chestnut mare is so undesireable that the colour and sex are often left out of the advert details!
I have heard that in mainland Europe they don't mind chestnuts but the "worst" colour is a grey mare. Daft! Sadly I only own one grey mare (my best horse by far) and three dark bays who IMO are very, very boring, refering to their colour only of course. One also has the pale muzzle (caused by the Pangare gene, it can make a black look like a bay too) and she sure does look like a mule at the mo' in her winter woolies!
I don't know how people dare to breed for colour? I put my half Trak mare (dark bay with 2 socks) to a KWPN stallion with a star, stripe and four socks and got an almost black foal with not one white hair on her whole body. But I LIKE chrome.
Michelle.
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Ele.na
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trakehner for me more than horses;this my life
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I plant the horses 10 years, and I had dream to have the grey trakehner stallion. The last year I have got him. 
I do not know the basic tendencies of Western market, but precisely I know, that melanisarkoma, which all of you so perfectly operate with, it transfers basically, if the horse has in a family tree the Arabian blood. As the Arabian horses are susceptible to this illness. 
You speak, that the grey horses have weakness of legs, it does not prove to be true by practice. Yes, they, basically have a white hoof, but now very good smiths, which make the horses perfect horseshoes.
And as to sulfur color, same Germany, in 1936 on Olympiad has won 6 gold medals on children and grandsons Nana Sachib and Cancara. And how the representatives of a line Famulus?? And you see before the program of performance were is more complex. Those who considers, that the grey horse has smaller potential, than anyone another, is absolutely not right. Yes there is a style, both on movements of the horses, and on their colour. But the style passes, and genetic potential îñòà¸òñÿ.
In Russia the trakehner horses are not sick melanosarkoma, more correctly, I about such cases did not hear, as the Arabian blood is added, basically, through the stallions of dark colours, and English thoroughbred horses of grey colour we have not enough.
And basically, grey colour cultivation in breed through Falstaff (l. Cancara) and Faharadscha (l. Famulus)
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Equine Connection
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As with many of the other posters, a "good horse is a good horse," no matter what the color. And I've not observed the connection between grey horses and bad feet/legs.
I definitely agree with Maren, Induc was (and is) a striking grey (a bit more white now), but what face, eyes and expression! Simply lovely. I've got video footage of him at NMS and he was definitely the crowd favorite. He has gone on to produce grey, black, bay and chestnut offspring.
IMO, the decision to geld or keep one as a stallion prospect should not be dictated by color. There are other very important factors to be considered in the decision-making process of "to geld, or not to geld."
Very best wishes with your boy! 
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Warm Regards,
Renee & Happy Hour
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shadytrake
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I LOVE Trakehners!
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My chestnut Erzsand (grey) mare is in foal to Stiletto (grey). Terri and I put our hand over her belly and asked the foal to kick once if it will be a grey and twice if it will be a chestnut.
It kicked once...tee hee 
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Khataan
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I have a friend that also has a mare bred to Stiletto. I can't wait to see the foal. I think he is beautiful!!!
Good luck and please post some picts!
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suzette b
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I think greys (or white, as they usually end up in a hurry) are just beautiful! I had one for many, many years, and loved him dearly. He was put down at age 19 due to some leg issues, but never had a spec of melanoma.
My complaint is that greys are always dirty!!!
I had to give him baths constantly, with an assortment of concoctions to remove a multitude of stains. I LOVE dark colored horses! Give me a black anyday! They have an elegant look, and are a heck of a lot easier to groom (I NEVER give my blacks baths. Hose off the sweat, and that's all. I have never used soap on Kreshendo a single time since he was born!)
I guess my least favorite color would be a plain chestnut. They have to have a lot of chrome before a chestnut looks good to me. Having said that, I have also had a plain chestnut mare, and loved her dearly 'til the day she died. She had a dear, quiet soul, totally bombproof, and was a wonderful producer - the opposite of what everybody always says.
My point is that everybody has "preferences". But does it make any difference in my decision as to buying a horse, or breeding to a stallion, or keeping a stud colt as a stallion prospect? Absolutely NOT!
I would buy and ride a Purple horse if he was good! (Actually, that would be kinda fun!)
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Tannenwald Trakehner
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TANZBRISE by Windfall out of Tariana
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Don't get me wrong--I certainly don't think color affects the quality of a horse, only that it can affect their marketability because of people's preferences.
I have a lot of chestnut horses (not bothering to count...) and have to say I believe the rap about them being difficult is unfounded.
Some people LOVE chrome, but remember:
One white foot, buy a horse
Two white feet, try a horse
Three white feet, sell him to your foes
Four white feet, feed him to the crows
?!
Then there are those who will count the whorls on the horse's face to tell if it is a good one or two much to bother with...
I have color preferences but not color prejudices Just about any color is OK, but grey/white is so hard to keep clean (so is pinto). And I do wish my grey filly would hurry up and go white, because she was born chocolate colored then turned purple, then pink, then a champagne color. Only this year did she really look grey. Most of these colors have not been attractive to me, but I have to admit, a lot of visitors to our farm have picked her out and said "Oh! I love that color!", whatever color she happened to be at the moment!
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Lara Meyer
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I have always loved greys and am so attracted to them in the ring. I have never had one though, so the thought of all the bathing and stain removing makes me think again  I guess it's worth it. I came to this breed because of Abdullah, seeing him in 1984 - first thought was WOW, look at that grey. Next was, how do you pronounce that? A sport horse with a beautiful face! I am expecting a Herzzauber foal this spring, out of a bay mare. Eileen says he throws his color about 30 percent of the time - NUTS! I really want a grey. Mare has Condus back a couple boxes, so I'm hoping grey will prevail. I must admit I did not think about marketability when I chose a grey stallion to breed to. I guess my logic is such that if I love greys, there are a lot of others out there like me. And a fly sheet for turnout does a lot for stains AND skin diseases. My least favorite is chestnut, don't know why, just doesn't grab me. My most favorite are the mocha, champagne, whatever-in-between turning grey colors.. and the winter-clipped bays who have that mocha/grey tone. Oh, and browns, but we don't see many of those. But this is just color preference.. I about died when I met Maren's Bouncer - a chestnut who did grab me, but for other reasons. That is one magnetic horse. So go figure... 
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Navar
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In Re: Poem about white feet. Most educated farriers will now tell you that is a folk tale and nonsense; that white feet can be just as hardy or as poor as any hoof of darker color. Depends upon the individual.
Amazing what horse people will latch onto and consider gospel. I was hoping that things like that would not surface in this breed, i.e., that certain colors can be tied to certain leg faults, white feet being a problem, grey horses are more sickly. Sounds like Quarter horse people talking; just like they say all Arabs are crazy. Then you have all the Polish Arabian breeders saying that all of the Straight Egyptian horses are crazy, and so forth and so on. I was surprised to hear so much about color prejudices. A preference I can understand but a prejudice? Interesting.
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Tannenwald Trakehner
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TANZBRISE by Windfall out of Tariana
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Whoa, back up the horse trailer....
I think perhaps you misunderstood my point of bringing up the poem, which is centuries old and certainly not of my own creation. I think a version of it was even included in the book Black Beauty.
I certainly don't subscribe to the idea that white feet are bad, or that chestnut mares are nuts, or anything along any of those color-lines amongst our horses. The point I was making is that there ARE color preferences and color prejudices, no matter how foolish and disproven they are, and the white foot issue mentioned in the poem is just an example of how ingrained some of these color notions are. Goodness, my stallion prospect has a star and four matching whites and I certainly hope no one would think of feeding him to the crows...
I don't think there is a poem about grey horses, but there may as well be, because in many cases I think it is harder to market grays than it was to market white feet in Black Beauty's era!
And while we are at it, I don't think it is really fair to take jabs at certain breeds or their people (ie QH people, etc). THAT is a slippery slope, and the next thing we will be doing is shelling each other over why dressage horses are better than hunter horses, etc. That kind of bickering and generalization, without clarification, can lead to all kinds of bad feelings.
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Navar
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The reference to Quarter Horse people was a generalization and please forgive me, but some of them do seem to be quite close minded and I just hope that is not where the Trakehner breed is headed with certain notions or ideas. I have owned Quarter horses, paints, Arabians, Appaloosas and TB's and love qualities about all of them. Being now more involved with Trakehners, I was/am hoping not to run into some of the same "issues". Maybe it's my naivete, but it was my intial impression that most Trakehner enthusiasts tend to be more educated about their horses than your average Quarter horse owner. I was just surprised to find tones of those same "issues" arising on this board. But as my husband says, "horse people are definitely 'different'".
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Janet
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Hey, Suzette! Guess what? .... Strauss just turned purple!!
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Lara Meyer
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Me-Ow..
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Holekamp
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I LOVE Trakehners!
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"In Re: Poem about white feet. Most educated farriers will now tell you that is a folk tale and nonsense; that white feet can be just as hardy or as poor as any hoof of darker color. Depends upon the individual."
The folklore behind the whitefoot poem is certainly not about "nonsense", but it is true that whitehoof hardness depends on genetic traits. I am quite sure that there is good science to support the idea that white feet can be problematic because of features about their "whiteness". It has been widely published that there are in fact two kinds of white horse hooves, based on the microtubular structure of the hoof itself, that are genetically determined. Soft white hooves have a looser microtubular structure and are indeed weaker and have more problems holding shoes and resisting wear and cracking without them. This feature breeds true, so it IS something to ask about in selecting whitefooted breeding stock. There are also the other kind of white hooves, which are just as strong as dark hooves, and have a very different microtubular structure. I believe that in the QH breed the soft white hooves are plentiful but not in the Trakehner breed. Are there any well-educated farriers here who can clarify this? Seems like pretty basic horsecare knowledge and is found described in many places.
"Amazing what horse people will latch onto and consider gospel. I was hoping that things like that would not surface in this breed, i.e., that certain colors can be tied to certain leg faults, white feet being a problem, grey horses are more sickly"
And here too, being an old wives' tale debunker may be a popular role to play and seem quite righteous, but fact does need to enter in, doesn't it? Gray horses in the Thoroughbred breed (and therefore probably in our breed also) live about three to four years less than colored horses on average, mainly because of the strong tendency to develop widespread (but non-metastasizing) melanomas (of skin, genitalia, and other places, interfering with the GI tract) which DO cause many elderly gray horses to waste away and then die, a bit early. Gray horses also have difficulties being accepted in herds made up mainly of colored horses, and tend to be driven out. This has been clearly demonstrated in observational studies of "wild" horses in the open plains, and many owners of large herds of horses can confirm it. It is thought that this might be behavior of avoidance among the colored members, instinctively caused by the damage to the herds' camouflage out in open country from the whiteness of the gray horse. Anyone who has ever seen an albino deer in the woods in a herd of normally-colored deer will instantly understand the issue with regard to predation. This may be why gray horses kept in large groups of multi-colored horses seem to roll in the mud more often and more completely than their mates, perhaps as a way to "blend in". And that behavior CAN be problematic to the time-challenged owner/showperson.
A gray stallion that produces 30% grays is causing lethality in gray prenatal foals. The gene for gray is autosomal dominant and a heterozygous gray stallion bred to a colored mare "should" produce exactly 50% gray offspring. That ratio will be altered for two reasons, both involving in-utero death of some gray foals-to-be. Homozygous gray horses are quite rare except in "purebred" gray herds. The reason almost surely is the decreased viability of homozygous grey fetal foals. (In our breed the only homozygous gray stallion I know of is Rombus. He has never produced a non-gray foal, as far as I know, and at the point when we were breeding to him had produced 36 straight grays on this side of the pond.) So crossing a gray mare to a gray stallion would otherwise always involve two parents who each have one gray gene. (remember: any gray horse that parents even one non-gray foal is heterozygous). A fourth of the time the gray genes will both appear in the embryo and be lethal (but not quite 100%, as it is in roans). That reduces the number of gray foals to some percentage below 50%. But that effect alone does not make for 30%, given the assumption that the sire in question is being bred to the usual mix of gray and colored mares. There must be some other mild lethality involved with some graying genes (remember: not all gray genes are exactly the same, all involve a DNA defect in the code for an enzyme that makes color, but the defect does not have to be the same one in every case). That means that some gray genes may be more lethal than others. Additionally there is likely a higher lethality to a double dose of the exact same gray-gene mutation. So it matters somewhat where the two graying genes came from, ie same source or different source.
Herzzauber, curiously, had two gray parents. His sire, the incomparable Marduc got his gray gene from his maternal grandsire Ferlin, who was himself the great-grandson of Fetysz ox, one the two very important Polish Arabs obtained from the Janov stud in about 1934 in a swap for bloodlines by the Trakehnen mainstud. Herzzauber's dam, Herzminze, got her gray gene from her maternal grandsire Erzand (that great producer of wonderful dressage horses (cf. Laura W's Portraet and many others)), who in turn got his gray gene from his famous mother Ezra. By a fascinating coincidence Ezra got her gray gene from her mother, the foundation mare Elfe, whose sire was the OTHER gray stallion obtained in the very same Janov-Trakehnen swap almost seventy years ago, Adamas ox! These two boys, Adamas and Fetysz, were born in the same barn but were not closely related, and likely brought different genetic defects to the "graying table", so to speak.
For those of you who do not believe in "coincidence", Rombus, the one survivor of the "double-gray lethality" described above, carries exactly those same two gray genes, one from Fetysz ox (from Ferlin) and the other from Adamas ox (via his grandsire, Erzand). Interesting that both Herzzauber and Rombus should end up in Canada.
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Tannenwald Trakehner
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TANZBRISE by Windfall out of Tariana
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Wow, Tim, I did not realize there was an issue of lethality with grey. I thought homozygous greys were far more common than you would indicate. My knowledge of grey is limited to knowing that when I breed a grey to any other color I have at least a 50% chance of grey (at least referring only to the situation where the grey is homozygous). Interesting.
Another thing with respect to that 50% (which would not take into consideration a lethality issue), or even Herzzauber's 30%, is that those statistics will depend on the sample size. If you have 4 foals and only one is grey, that doesn't mean that the grey will come through only 25% of the time. It likely means that your sample number (4) is not large enough, and the non-grey gene has beat the odds in coming through.
WRT white hooves, I have read in many places that white hooves are not different in quality or strength than colored hooves. These sources have all indicated that the white-hoof=bad-hoof thing is a fallacy. The hard-white vs soft-white distinction is very interesting, and this is the first I have heard about it. Perhaps this is why the QH folks I have ever talked to firmly believe in the inferiority of white feet?
You have just been a font of information this morning Tim, and I have one other question for you:
What should be the hoof quality of a Trakehner (important only in that there is no QH lineage) with white legs and white hoofs with ermine marks (ie, striped hooves)? Would the structure of the pigmented part of the hoof be different than the structure of the white?
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Actually, I think it is my post to which you may be referring. 