This post first appeared on September 27, 2011
I had a few more detail shots of Colt, my friend Marge’s elderly few spot gelding who was used in yesterday’s post.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about mottling, homozygous appaloosas like Colt often have more pronounced face mottling. Here are some pictures of his muzzle.

In my experience, homozygous appaloosas seem more likely to have this kind of mottling, where it looks like areas of pink skin with an overlay of small, dark spots.

They also seem more likely to have mottling around the eyes. (Although it is not something that changes the look of the eyes, homozygous appaloosas are also night blind.)

Here is the muzzle of the snowcap appaloosa from this previous post. (His nose is a little dirty from wuffling the ground, so his nose doesn’t look as pink.)

He has less pronounced mottling around his eyes, but he does have it.

Here is another body shot of him. Notice how light his front hooves are, even though those legs are solid (and black-pigmented).  Also note how very white his hindquarters are. That is one way to know he is not a false snowcap, because the real ones often have underlying pink skin that give them that really, really white look.

If you look closely at the lower legs on this fellow, you can also see that he has the bronzing effect that someone mentioned in the comments section of yesterday’s post. He is a bay horse. See how red the upper part of that leg looks, and the difference in tone at the knee? But when you get down to the hoof, the ankles are a silvery buff. That’s one of the other things that the leopard complex gene can do, though it doesn’t seem to do it all the time. I hope to make a longer post about it in the future, but I’d like to gather more photos for it if I can.