Silver dapple update

Northgait’s Dakota, bay silver dapple Mountain Pleasure Horse gelding

I recently told y’all that scientists had found the gene responsible for silver dapple–genetic testing is now available! Contact UC Davis or Pet DNA Services for more info. I hope a test for dun is in the works as well. People often don’t understand horse colours or how they work; all too often I see people claiming a horse is a rare or unusual colour (which jacks up the price or stud fee accordingly) when they don’t have what they think they do. I’m willing to believe most people are just simply misinformed, but I’ve also seen people making claims when they ought to know better–don’t know if that’s deliberate deceit or wilful blindness…

Spookies: Our beloved Savanna

Good ol’ Shadowlands. 😉 Cleaned up for reposting. (Has there been a catastrophic failure of shift keys worldwide that I didn’t hear about?)

Hello everyone. This story happened to me when I was about 13-14. I live on a small farm in New Mexico. I guess you could call it more of a petting zoo rather than a farm. We have dogs and cats, but we have more horses than anything else. Well anyway, my first horse, Abby, was the cutest little (and fattest) pony that you ever saw. We had her until I was around 9, and then she got so old and blind that she couldn’t eat and the other horses just treated her awfully. So we eventually had to put her down and the was one of the most horrible things that’s ever been done to me. So, anyway, here I was, horseless, and with a giant ride coming up the next week, so my mom, (unable to find a horse in that short span of time), very reluctantly let me ride Savanna, a very sweet, but very high-spirited palomino Tennesee Walking Horse. Only my much older sisters had ever been able to ride her, but as soon as I got on, we clicked beautifully and we were a pair from that day forth. About four years went by and Savanna got horribly sick with an illness called bastard strangles. It’s a nasty illness that causes the animal’s throat to fill up with a nasty pus-like fluid. We thought she was getting better so we let her out into the arena while we were gone. My sister got home first and found her dead in the arena. They already had her buried by the time I got home, which was good, and I soon got another horse (a devil pony by the name of Barbie). About a month after Savanna died, my sisters and I were out riding and playing a game called butt tag when each and every one of us distinctly saw Savanna running with us. All the other horses were put up and we all recognized her by her signature stop, which would throw any inexperienced rider off. We looked for her again but we couldn’t see her; as we were running around my sister ran through an icy cold spot ( it was about 85 everywhere else). Of course all of us had to go see for ourselves, and sure enough it was cold there. We were all happy because we felt as if Savanna was trying to tell us that she was okay. We could feel her every once in a while, and still to this day (about 3 years later) we can still see her running across the property, and we can sense Abby and the other animals are out there following behind her.