The Gorgeous Palomino Horse

Palomino horses can be found on ancient tapestries, paintings and other artefacts of Europe and Asia and in Chinese and Japanese art over two thousand years old. Royalty and warlords revered these golden horses.

Palomino is a color and not a breed. Breeding a palomino to a palomino does not guarantee a palomino foal. The offspring can be chestnut or cremello. The horse to the right is Saphiro, a handsome cremello stallion.

These horses vary in shade from pale cream to a rich golden color. The mane and tail is usually white but may be gold and/or have dark hairs. Like chestnuts palomino horses may be affected by the sooty gene, when they display dark dapples. The effect is not unattractive but is nevertheless considered to be “incorrect” when compared with an “ideal” palomino. The coat of many palominos changes shade from cream in the winter to golden in the summer (seasonal palominos).

Pale palominos are sometimes called Isabellas, after Queen Isabella de-Bourbon of Spain, who is much remembered for pawning her jewels to fund Columbus' voyages to the “New World”. The word Palomino is itself a Spanish surname, derived from a Latin word meaning pale dove. Queen Isabella kept a hundred golden horses (but forbid her commoners to own one!). She did, however send a Palomino stallion and five mares to her Viceroy in Mexico (then called New Spain) to perpetuate the horse in the “New World”. North America palominos originally came from the Spanish settlements, presumably descendants of Queen Isabella’s horses.

Genetics of palomino:Palominoes have a base coat color of chestnut (i.e. of genotype ee, eaea or eea at the extension locus) and genotype C+CCr at the C locus (the cream dilution gene). The CCr allele is semi-dominant and dilutes red pigment to yellow in a single dose (i.e. in palominos). The wild-type C+ allele is effectively recessive since it needs to be homozygous for there to be no dilution of the base color. (Horse Genetics.com)

The two horses in the photos are Lusitanos, which originate in Portugal.

I personally owned Andalusians, and palomino is not an Andalusian color.

Andalusians are supporting actors in Hot Spanish Nights, an erotic novella, by Bianca Swan, now available from The Wild Rose Press.