Which would you choose?

           

Horse and Pony Colours: Which would you choose? Lesley Lodge

Copyright © Lesley Lodge, 2013 All rights reserved

“A good horse is never a bad colour.” This is very true. But let’s imagine. If you had the chance to choose the perfect horse or pony with the colour you’d really, really like, what colour would you choose? This excerpt is taken from: Chapter Nine: The Coloured Horse

Coloured (in UK English) or ‘colored’ (in American English) can cover a number of interesting colour combinations including: piebald (black and white), skewbald (brown and white or brown and black and white) and Appaloosa (white with black or dark brown spots). 1

Appaloosas never have the exact same patterning of spots as each other. They can come in a variety of colours but the basic colours include: • Snowflake: essentially a white coat with very small coloured spots (a sort of opposite to the flea-bitten grey) • Blanket: has a solid body colour but with a white blanket-shaped patch on the back which often has spots • Few Spot: as you would expect, a horse with only a few spots • Leopard: a white or whiteish horse with coloured spots, like a leopard One odd fact about Appaloosas: they have striped hooves. Coloured horses have many very enthusiastic fans but it is a sad fact that they have often also been discriminated against. This has especially been the case in British racing where for some racing enthusiasts, a horse with any markings more than a splash of white on the head or a white sock or two on the leg is considered inferior and not able to race alongside thoroughbreds. Way back in 1939 a novel by Enid Bagnold highlighted this discrimination. The book, National Velvet, was about a young girl who discovers that her outwardly very ordinary horse has amazing speed and great jumping ability. She trains him for racing and because girls were simply not allowed to ride in such races at the time she disguises herself as a boy in order to ride the horse in the Grand National race. The Grand National was then – as it still is one of the most famous horse races in the world. In the novel, the horse was a piebald or coloured horse and not at all good-looking. He was simply called “The Pie”. But when it came to the film version, of course the casting directors were unable to resist the temptation of picking a really handsome horse for the part. And so ‘The Pie’ was played not by a piebald horse but by a seven-year-

old thoroughbred called King Charles. His colouring was a sorrel red with a white stripe on his face and four white socks – not a standard bay but certainly not a coloured horse as such. And instead of being ugly, he had the classic good looks that go with being a thoroughbred. To be fair, though, to those in charge of casting, they of course had to choose a horse that could actually race and jump convincingly. Another film that tried to show that coloured horses could race was the 2004 movie Hidalgo. Hidalgo has Viggo Mortensen playing a washed-up show cowboy rider, Frank, who owns an endurance racing horse, the Hidalgo of the film title. This horse is a small mixed-breed coloured mustang. The two of them enter a gruelling threethousand-mile survival race across Arabia, competing with pure-bred Arab stallions. This race had always been restricted and only the finest Arabian horses had been allowed to compete. In the film, though, a wealthy Arab invites Frank and his horse to compete because Frank had once been famous in America (before he took to drinking too much) as ‘the greatest rider the West had ever known’. In the film, Frank and Hidalgo have to overcome huge natural problems such as a huge dry desert and sandstorms but they also face prejudice and even violence simply for being foreign. Obviously Frank sticks out because he is the only American but the horse is discriminated against for being ‘only’ a mustang instead of a purebred Arabian horse but also because he is a ‘paint’ or coloured horse as well. Coloured or ‘Paint’ horses were traditionally regarded as being of mixed breed, and were usually shown in the old Western films as horses ridden by Native Americans (who were referred to as ‘Red Indians’ in those days). So both rider and horse in Hidalgo must stand up for what they are. The race becomes a matter of pride as well as a test of their

very survival. There are some superb racing sequences and some scenes of incredible endurance. Hidalgo suffers some horrific injuries in the film. There are some exciting scenes: all the racing horses are clearly racing for real - their nostrils flaring as they gallop across all sorts of different landscapes. There is a scene where the injured Hidalgo has even lost his saddle. But finally he races through to the sparkling blue sea at the finishing line. Coloured horses in real life can have all sorts of patterns of brown and white – or sometimes a reddish brown and white (occasionally also with patches of black). Often the patterns on a coloured horse can look really complicated, as if someone had jumbled up a jigsaw of a white horse and a brown horse.

Coloured horses in a clearing in the forest, Costa Rica Copyright: Lesley Lodge