Another horse, this time a Miniature Horse, shows a minimized form of the classic splashed white pattern.
Here is another interesting splash white that is homozygous for SW1, sent in by Robin Cole. Unlike the Gotland in the previous post, this mare does have blue eyes, but the white on her face is quite minimal. Like the Gotland, she has four white feet, but all but one leg are very minimally marked. Her pattern looks even more minimal when seen from her other side, probably because the skew in her blaze keeps most of the white away from this side of her face.
Although she comes from a line that carries frame (Oh Cisco), she tested negative for that pattern. And while she might look tobiano, especially to readers familiar with how tobiano often skews in Miniatures and Shetlands, neither parent is a tobiano. They do look like heterozygous splashes, and the family is known to produce splash patterns. In fact, this is her full sister.
So while homozygous SW1 horses are pretty consistent in appearance, minimized patterns can be found. That seems especially true among the breeds – like the Gotlands, Icelandics, Shetlands and Miniatures – that are already known to minimize the tobiano pattern. Here are links to a few interesting examples of minimal homozygous SW1 from those breeds: Bládís vom Moarschusterhof, an Icelandic mare with what appears to be one dark front leg Hnísa vom Römerberg, an Icelandic mare, also with a seeming dark foreleg Unun frá Efri-Úlfsstöðum, an Icelandic mare with an irregular blaze and minimal white Glæta frá Ártúnum, an Icelandic mare with a large star, large snip and what may be a dark eye (with each of these links, you can click on the first image to pull up additional images) Opp, a Gotland mare with a face marking much like the one on the Miniature in this post She does have a more extensive body pattern, though.
And finally, while it is not a minimized pattern, this Gotland mare Nanna does have an unusual skew to her pattern. Along with minimizing the white, skewing patterns seems to be another (relatively) common aspect in this group of breeds.
I had intended to do a post on blue eyes and negative splash tests, but I think it makes more sense to shift that post to after the ones about white markings since those two things are closely related. I am also going to take a little detour into blue eyes of a different kind, though, before tackling the markings. Watch for that in the next day or two. And if you have not done so already, you can get notifications of new posts to the blog via email by filling out the subscription form in the right hand sidebar. I apologize to long-time readers that had a subscription before and now have to re-subscribe, but that was the one thing that did not transfer with the blog when it was moved to a self-hosted site.