Click here to skip to the most recent pictures, etc.
(but still only from 2010), which are at the bottom of this page.

As of age 3 1/2 in February 2001, he'd been round-pen trained; obeyed voice commands from the ground; stood for mounting; did a nice walk, trot, & canter under saddle; had been used on trails, & loved it ; showed nicely in western adult walk-trot; was a bold explorer; loads & clips well (LOVES being clipped); works best for a kind, reassuring, firm handler/rider.

We sometimes called Doc "The Wonder Horse",
but it was because we WONDERED what in the world COLOR he was!

The pictures immediately below are all from 1999-2000, when he was still just a little guy. We don't have any "professional" or even well-posed pictures, that would make him look his best. They were all taken just for color studies,
and for recording fun times!

Please click the thumbnail-sized pictures to see larger versions.

Doc's pedigree

Doc is a great-great grandson of two famous horses: Doc Bar (once) and Impressive (twice) (he's HYPP N/N);  also has Blondy's Dude, King, Skipper W, Dial Adair, Plaudit and Three Bars (frequently) in his pedigree.

Doc's sire, AQHA reg. Slippin Thru the Dew, 1993, #3244684, Palomino. His neck and body (but not his head) are wet in this picture. His last known location was NE of Cincinnati, OH, at the H bar J ranch, in or near Maineville. Doc's dam, AQHA Miss Doc Gage, is registered as a red dun. We haven't seen her, or a picture of her, yet, but I did speak to her owner as of 2001, and he assured me she was a normal, red dun color. Her last known location was SW PA.

May 2000 - age, about 3.

	Doc grazing, late spring or early summer of 2000.
	This cocked-hip picture does not show off his conformation very well, but it DOES show the darker top line (see explanation below.)
	Doc's summer coat was coming in pale beige. I hope you can see it here. He still has some "winter white" hair on his belly, etc. (The pink skin on his nose is due to his large blaze.)
	"Let's get his face this time" ... OK, Doc's downhill, and I'm using a telephoto lens ... he's not THAT small.
	Another attempt at posing Doc. Doc would prefer to eat the grass. Doc's still new to us, and Joe's still new to horse training, here.
	Joe points to Doc's rump and he turns on the forehand. He knew nothing about this stuff when we got him, and Doc used to try to cow kick if asked to turn. What a horse trainer Joe is turning into! Note Doc's dorsal shading, for what it's worth. His tail is just dirty; it's purest white, as is his mane, when cleaned up. I'm the only one that ever bathes horses.

Is Doc Dun?

He had many dun markings during his 3 year old summer.
(For an unexpected match of Doc's color, see the "yellow dun" Fjordhorse on this page.)

Click on the thumbnail pictures below to enlarge them.

Left is Doc's rump in May 2000 before the sun faded his counter- shading away; right is the dun line left after being exposed to 24 hr. turnout for a little over a month (end of June). It extends crisp and unbroken, though light grey in color, from his mane to his tail. He also has some tan roots growing down the center of his nearly-white mane, and also in his tail, but the "guard hairs" are white root to tip, a pattern slightly similar to these wild duns. He also has a lot of horizontal color on his knees, another typically dun trait (dark lower legs), though it's cut off by his high pointy socks/stockings. His ears are outlined in tan, and he has the striped hair growth patterns on his neck and chest that Hardy Oelke says trace back to the wild Iberian dun horse roots of the Mustang.

If you look with an unprejudiced eye you can see faint barring on the backs of his upper forelegs, especially when in the shade. Unfortunately, it's more noticeable in person. August 1999 it was also visible on his hind legs. (As of 2005 it was all invisible, permanently.)

All photos above taken in June 2000 (If you really cannot see any slightly-darker barring when you click on the pictures at left, your monitor may be too bright. Try turning the darkness down until you can see them.)

<= In this picture from March 2000 you can see a little bit how in his winter coat his face was darker than his body, though he has a big blaze that obscures the center of it and any cobwebbing; also ear tips and slight ear barring are visible. (Click to see full size.)

Now there's a test for "dun markers",
but we really don't care enough any more to spend the time & money on it...

<= Four months later, in July 2000, his darker summer coat was already so sun-bleached that he looked white again (left).

I also tried to find out, early on, if he could be Champagne ...

HE ISN'T, but
in the process of investigating that,
I ended up starting the International Champagne Horse Registry.

I used to wonder (before there were tests for all of it)
whether the whiteness of his color was not due to (just) the cream gene,
which produces most Palominos, but to the champagne gene.
It's not.

- Click the thumbnail photos below to see actual size -

To the left (excuse the rudeness of the photo, but this is one important place to look for pink, freckled skin to determine whether a horse carries the champagne gene). The sun was not angled quite right, casting the base of the tail into shadow; however, you can still see that the skin is a rosy color with darker grey or purplish mottling. You can't see it in the thumbnail here, click it to see it full size. It's all even lighter in person than it looks here. June 2000.  But the under-tail skin of an actual champagne looks like THIS (it's our amber cream mare.)

Here is a flashlight-lit picture of his sheath, which is colored the same way, from around August 2000.

"Mottling" on his muzzle occurs where his sabino blaze trails off into his body color.
It's different than champagne freckling.

He has a few other odd color traits, too. The skin on his chest and the underside of his neck is lighter pink with small purple blotches (click on thumbnail at left to see BIG photo taken in summer of 2000.) In some places, like his lower legs, it's more purple with pink blotches (this may correspond to the darker hair there = dun coloring). In some places I can't get him wet enough to see it! His hair seems to repel water.  We've since seen pictures of other palominos with skin like this.

Now for his eyes and the skin around them. The skin around his eyes is solidly dark. It almost looks like "eyeliner", compared to the rest of his skin. His eyes are brown; not as dark as they appear in these photos.

He's also a sabino. Doc was APHA eligible, before the rule changes.

These are his characteristics of sabino: a wide blaze that goes all the way under his chin, with a dark spot or two in the middle of it; "pointy" socks/stockings with "blue zones" at the edges of most of his white markings; roaning: white hairs mixed in with the "beige" ones all over, including his face; and....

Here are pictures of the streak of partly-pink-skinned white on his pale tan belly. The sabino "roaning" is one reason why he looks so light, and has pink skin with darker dots on his chest, etc. This is not true roan, but an expression of the sabino or perhaps the cream gene, in which white hairs are evenly mixed in with the colored ones all over the horse's head, body and legs. His much-darker-Palomino sire has this "roaning" as well.

On his muzzle, the dark spot in the blaze has pink mottling in it, and part of the white of his blaze has purple mottling in it. This trait I have also seen on other pictures of sabinos. (SABINO is the form of a paint gene that causes the socks, stockings and blazes on most horses.)

So, he's most likely a "sabino-roaned dunalino".

Our farrier, a QH man, says "he'd make a great cow horse, and is
beautiful, extremely intelligent and sensitive."

Joe wanted a pleasure/trail riding buddy to replace old Bill, who is now deceased.
And now that Doc has "grown up", and has continued to be a sweet, affectionate (though high-strung) horse, Joe is "in love". And so he often says!

Thanks to the HorseOfADifrentColor (now the CPEA Yahoogroup) list,
for helping me put together some of the pieces of the puzzle that is Doc's color,
and especially for putting up with my obsession
with finding out what color this little gelding really is!

Thanks to my beloved son for all the photo scanning,
back when I didn't have a working scanner or a digital camera!

Doc at the Harvest Home Fair Horse Show, September 2000

Old Bill didn't get to go ... and Sugar wasn't even born, yet ... just Doc and Amir, the amazing chestnut-with-pangare (minimal-sabino) flying Arabian. We finally got the pictures scanned ... and poor Barbara Burton, who encouraged me to try halter with Doc "just for fun", and even tried to "coach" us via email, was sitting at home in Alabama with a busted computer, so she couldn't see them yet. Oh, well...

First, Doc in the reg. AQHA halter class:

Well, now you all can see why he came in 4th out of four... that's the 1st place winner, in front of him...what do you think, they went to a service station just before the show and inflated her? Ha ha! Oh, and Doc's the "white" one, in case anyone doesn't know <grin>. And that's me, with my back to the camera, holding him. Oh, well, he behaved himself, which was the point to me, also finding out what halter class is like...whew... it was the first one for both of us!  His age is just 3 years 2 months in the show pictures, and he has grown SO much since then! I pray I can show him again, some day.

Open Western Walk-Trot.

 I'm on Doc, the "white" horse, who is trying to run away from kids on the bleachers ... that's why I'm riding him so strangely. Neighbor kids had been harassing Doc (even shooting him with paint balls!) where he is boarded, so he was very leery of the kids in the audience. That's why I had to keep the outside rein (closest to the camera) taught. "Backstage", he was fine, other than wanting to keep Amir in sight. He was fine on the other 3 sides of the arena, of course, when the judge wasn't watching.

A few months after the show, Doc's new winter coat which came in with an actual COLOR, with DAPPLES, but soon bleached all to white again. Taken November 2000, before it bleached out.

His mane and tail are just DIRTY; they're glowing white through and through, when they're clean. As I wrote, he doesn't get baths unless I do it. See the show pictures, above, for what it looks like clean.

Taken by Joe on April 30, 2007:

Doc's almost 10 here. Barb's older than that.
Doc's about 1050 lbs. and a hair under 15 H. Barb's taller than that but doesn't weigh as much.
In the last picture his head is being pushed back... he really has a prettier neck than that!

February 2009

Spring 2009

July 2010:

Early December snowstorm, 2010:

...also try these video links: #1 #2

Christmas Eve ride in the snow, 2010

December 2011 Riding Lesson

Hope you enjoyed "the Doc show"!