This post first appeared on May 26, 2012
In the previous post, I talked about the two things that cause horses to have small dark spots on a white background. The first was the leopard pattern (Leopard Complex + Pattern1) and the second was the homozygous tobiano pattern. In this post, I want to talk about how dark spots on a white background are different in dogs.
Dalmatian dogs look like leopard appaloosas. It’s the same white background and the same small, round spots of color. But Dalmatians are genetically very different from leopards. In fact, they have a lot more in common with the homozygous tobianos. That’s because they are “pinto” dogs. They just happen to be missing (or at least mostly missing) their dark patches. In fact, if you can imagine someone starting out with a classic tobiano horse – dark head, large round areas of color on the body – you have a good idea of what the basic piebald pattern is in dogs. In fact, in some countries the name for tobiano and the name for this pattern in dogs is the same: plating. Plattenscheck, platenbont – plate pinto. It makes sense, since tobianos have large “plates” of color on a white background. These dogs do, too. Or at least they started out that way. Here is a popular sire of English Setters from a little over a century ago.
His pattern is very reminiscent of tobiano. But breeders did not care for the patches, so they began breeding away from them.
In dogs, this kind of pattern is often called “extreme piebald”. It is still a “pinto” dog, but it doesn’t have a lot of color left, even on the face. English Setter breeders were not alone in this preference. The Dalmatian breeders were selecting for the same thing. They did not want patches, or even dark ears. They wanted all-over round spots.
Those round spots, which are visible in all three of these English Setters, look a lot like cat tracks to someone familiar with tobiano. What makes them different is that they aren’t actually part of the plating pattern. They are a separate thing entirely. For English Setters and some of the other sporting breeds, that’s the “Belton” pattern. The more technical names for it – ticking and roaning – are unfortunately for us horse people, already taken by very different patterns. So for now we’ll just use Belton to avoid making this any more confusing.
Belton adds dark spots of color to the areas the piebald pattern leaves white. What dog breeders have done is manipulate the scale and spacing of those spots of color. All three dogs at the top of this post have what are believed to be variations on this kind of patterning. The English Setter to the left is of course the original Belton pattern. The Dalmatian in the middle is likewise has a Belton-type pattern, but he also has some kind of modifier that has made the spots larger, rounder and more distinct. (Some of the distinctive nature of his spots are, of course, because he is a sleek-coated dog compared to the setter.) The Australian Cattle Dog at the end has a Belton-type pattern that was modified to the other end of the spectrum, with spots that have gotten smaller, less round and less distinct. In some breeds, this is what is called Roan. There is some debate about whether Roan and Ticking in dogs are truly separate, or just variations on the same gene. I am not aware of any papers yet published with molecular studies, but it does seem that roan dogs, when outcrossed to non-roan breeds, end up with offspring that look a lot like the Belton setters. Certainly whether these are separate, similar genes or the same gene with layers of modifiers, the end result is that dogs have independent factors that will “recolor” the area that a piebald gene left white.
It didn’t seem that horses had that, at least not until recently.
In 2009 a French sport horse, Vision Morinda was foaled. (The link will take you to the website for her breeder, and her page which has many high-quality photos of her at all ages.) At first glance, it is tempting to assume that Vision Morinda is a tobiano with very loud cat tracking. The problem is that she cannot be homozygous. Her dam is brown. (Note that the mare she is pictured with is a surrogate. Her dam, Scarlett Fontanel, is pictured here.) But perhaps even more intriguing is the fact that her spotting seems to have intensified as she matured. That’s something that is typical of the Belton patterns. As most people are aware thanks to the Disney movie, Dalmatian puppies are born white and develop their spots later. That’s true of the English Setters and the Australian Cattle Dogs. Here is my friend Mary’s (extremely cute) Cattle Dog mix, Volt, as a puppy. (Thank you, Mary, for letting me share your photos!)
As you can see, he looks like a white dog with black patches. He is an extreme piebald. That’s why he has white ears. Well, mostly white ears. He was already starting to show some spotting there. His back and sides, however, looked white. But here is Volt today, as a grown dog.
As you can see, he developed his ticking – the Belton-type pattern – over time.
In a less dramatic fashion, Vision Morinda seems to have spotting that intensified as she matured. The spotting on her is also different, visually, from a typical tobiano with cat tracks. The pattern is evenly distributed. The spacing does change somewhat (notably across her shoulder) but it still is pretty consistent across the white areas, rather than clustering into spots or patches. It looks like the ticking you would see on a dog, not a horse.
This raises the question of whether there is some factor in horses that can add ticking – a Belton pattern, so to speak. I have a few more horses to share, all with odd spotting patterns. None are quite like Vision, but all have unexplained dark spots inside white patterns or markings. They all come from my “weird stuff” files. That’s where I put things that don’t make sense, or just seem “off” in some fashion. Sometimes enough of them accumulate – like the odd late greys from a few months ago – that it seems like there might be some thread connecting them all. I am not sure these horses really have a common thread, because they do have some visual differences, but I’m going to start posting them just to see if more turn up. That’s what happened with those greys (I have more that I need to post in the future, by the way!) so maybe sharing them will bring others out of the woodwork!
(Images at the top of the post are courtesy of Wikipedia. Images of historical English Setters come from The Pointer and Setter in America, published in 1911, and Country Life, Volume 22, 1907.)
