This post first appeared on February 25, 2012
This five year-old Saddlebred mare was recently listed on Craigslist, and her owner has allowed me to use her photos here. Longtime readers of the blog might remember the unusual greys that were discussed here (“Ponies Don’t Read”) and here (“Another Unusual Grey”). When I saw those horses, they reminded me of some a handful of unusual roaned Morgans that I had seen, though they were definitely not grey. This mare, however, is a lot more like the Morgans. You can see their pictures on the Morgan Colors site. The one most like this mare can be seen here:
Sleepys Select Rose
Sleepys Select Rose (winter coat)

I have seen a handful of other horses a bit like this one, all with roaning on the body that tends towards dappling or reverse dappling, dark legs and white on the face. I’ve tended to categorize them as some kind of odd sabino roan, simply because right now just about anything that produces roaning and white markings gets lumped into that category. Of the existing categories, it was the closest match. But it is much more likely that what we call “sabino” is a lot of different things. What seems to be true of horses like this mare is that they are usually connected – when their backgrounds can be determined, at least – to sabino roan families of a certain visual type. Those are horses that look quite a lot like true roans, only they are more uniformly roaned over their entire body. They usually have dark legs and some white on the front of the face, rather than the wrap-around blaze typical of ‘flashy white’ sabinos.

I have inquired about this particular mare’s background, to see if there are similar connections, and will post any information I receive. In the meantime, if readers have horses with extensive roaning and white on the face but not the legs, but that are not true, dark-headed roans, I would love to see them.

UPDATE: The mare’s name is Wing’s Sable Sky. Her owner is in the process of getting larger pictures taken, so hopefully I can share those in the near future.