Talk:Highland pony

Fox Dun and Link to HPEC
Please do not remove these edits - fox dun is a recognised highland pony colour ranging from silver fox dun to dark fox dun with a great variety of colours inbetween.

Please also leave the link the Highland Pony Enthusiasts Club - this UK based non-commercial, non-profit making club has international membership and is considered an extremely valuable source of information and advice particularly for those new to the breed. If in doubt about fox duns for example if you use the search function within the website you will find a wealth of information about the colour (including photos)! It is directly analogous to the Native Pony Enthusiasts community which is a permitted link under the "mountain and moorland" section.

194.75.224.98 (talk) 15:49, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * This is wikipedia. There are style guidelines and procedures, but anyone can edit an article, and you are doing the right thing to take this to the talk page for discussion.  I took a longer look at this article and realized that it actually needs a lot of work, but for now am just tweaking the color and links section


 * In the color section, you are using non-standard color terminology. Thus, if you insist on using them because they are part of the breed standard, there needs to be an explanation for these terms.  If a "fox dun" is a red dun, then that needs to be explained. The Highland Pony society site, from which most of the breed characteristics section came, does not list "fox dun." Likewise in the case of a "gray dun" and "mouse dun" which presumably are very similar colors (??), the more common term for these is "blue dun"  The Fjord horse article provides a good example of how to explain when a breed uses odd color terminology to describe its members... I am going to review the Highland pony registry site and try to conform this article to their terminology. -- Looks to me like the Highlands have similar things going on as do the Fjords, basically the dun gene acts on a bay, gray or chestnut base coat and maybe there is also a cream or silver dapple dilution gene in there.  Has anyone analysed this in terms of DNA testing?


 * As for the links, the purpose of external links is not a laundry list to things that actually should be in the article itself, it is to be those sources which provide major information, references for the article, or material that due to copyright or length is not appropriate for the text of the article. If the links you added.  You may want to take a look at the wikipedia manual of style to see what is considered desirable in wikipedia articles.  Montanabw (talk) 02:16, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Please find attached extract of email from HPS secretary confirming that the Highland Pony Society accepts fox dun. I do not have your email address to forward the email but if you wish to contact her directly she will be happy to forward the information directly to you as confirmation of the validity of my corrections to the colour descriptions.

"Many thanks for your email. In the HPS characteristics sheet, the colours are referred to as follows: “A range of duns; mouse, yellow, grey and cream. Also, grey, brown, black and occasionally bay and liver chestnut with silver mane and tail. “ It doesn’t specifically mention fox dun but that is certainly an acceptable colour and is recorded as that on registrations papers as appropriate. A fox dun’s coat is basically chestnut and usually has an eel stripe (see attached photo). If breeders registering ponies are in doubt about the specific type of dun, they should just record the pony as “dun”. I would avoid descriptions such as “biscuit” dun for obvious reasons!"

194.75.224.98 (talk) 10:58, 12 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, all of this is Original research. At any rate, it sounds like a "Fox Dun" is what we in the USA call a "red dun." ALL duns have a dorsal stripe, that's part of how you can tell a dun from other types of dilution gene colors.  I'm going to check with our UK English experts on whether this terminology is standard UK English or just a Highland Pony thing and edit accordingly.   Montanabw (talk) 04:58, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Colour stuff, again
Hi 194.75.224.98. I am getting comments from some other wikipedians who use UK English and have been tossed some information that is helping me sort out these colors, which DO appear to mostly be Highland Pony lingo, and thus nonstandard for other horse people. See the edits I did and the comparisons to various more common terms used for duns of other breeds. Then take a look at dun gene and grullo to see photos of various dun shades. My goal is to have your breed lingo compared to more common terms so that everyone understands what is being discussed.

To see what I mean, look at the coat color descriptions in Fjord horse, a breed where they also use very odd terminology to the ears of other horse people.

Then tell me if I have it correct that the Highland "mouse duns" are basically the same as grullos, yellow duns are classic or "bay duns," Fox duns are like red duns, etc... the Highlands, from the look of them on these web sites and various descriptions, appear to possibly carry not only the dun gene, but also the cream gene, the gray (horse) gene, and possibly the silver dapple gene. Thus if all these genes hit the same horse, I can see how some odd colors (er, colours) can arise. Genetically, they are rather fascinating. Take a look at those articles and see if we can come to a common understanding of the terms. As is common with other breed registries, color descriptions may or may not be in line with the modern understanding of coat color genetics. See also equine coat color genetics. Montanabw (talk) 08:20, 16 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Fox Dun is used as description of colour by a number of the British Native Breed societies as well as by some US breeds. The British Native pony societies are not terribly constrained by documentation - a great deal of the information being passed more informally.  It is  interesting to note that a number of the colour descriptions commonly used in the US are never in practice used in the UK (except where dealing with the US).  For example Mouse Dun is the same as Grullo, but Grullo is not an accepted term for most UK breed societies - this is a matter of differences in language neither being incorrect (although one might assume that the UK description would be more appropriate for a UK breed - in the UK you will never see a horse or pony described as Grullo).  Highland ponies do not carry the cream gene (except by mutation in which case the pony and its progeny could not be registerd in the main stud book), however, the grey gene is in fact prevalent (at least 50% of highland ponies are grey, though this is often termed grey dun where the foal commences life as a dun which greys out, black foals greying out are greys), and silver dapple is questionable.

194.75.224.98 (talk) 13:57, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * This paragraph should have appeared earlier: I did a search of my 2 horse genetics books, other assorted papers and a book on horse colours and failed to locate any mention of the fox dun colour which would appear to be a variation of a red dun. Cgoodwin (talk) 23:41, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * CG, do you mean that fox dun and red dun are the same color (dun on chestnut) or that they are something else??  Montanabw (talk) 20:13, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorting it out
OK, so let's take it from the top. Genetically, no matter the breed, there are three basic kinds of duns: Dun gene on a bay base coat, Dun on a chestnut, and Dun on a black. Period. No matter what any of us call them, anything else more complicated means that some other gene is involved in addition to the dun gene and the base coat color.

The most common gene that lands on top of dun and a base seems to be the cream gene, one copy of which makes palomino on chestnuts and buckskin on bays (BTW, someone told me that people in the UK call a non-dun-gene buckskin a "dun" --  is that true?). If there are two copies, the horse winds up with blue eyes and a totally washed-out cream coat regardless of base color. (see cremello, perlino and smoky cream -- you can barely tell them apart unless you do genetic testing)

Dun on all the base colors plus existence of cream dilution is what appears to be going on with the Norwegian Fjord horse, all of whom appear to be some kind of dun. Dun, cream, gray and god-knows-what-else definitely happens with the American Quarter Horses too --AQHA is the moving force behind funding a lot of the coat color genetics research going on in the USA.

So, can we match the terms-- US, UK, Native Breed lingo, whatever -- for each genetic possibility? Then I think we can make a good edit on the article that uses the term of art that the breeders use, but explains it in laymen's terms for the rest of us.

To begin: In the article, there are the four HPS registry terms for dun (and the original edit looks like it was copied verbatim from the HPS site, by the way) "mouse, yellow, grey (a grey dun?), and cream" plus your notation of "fox", plus other people that add "biscuit". Then the article goes on to add solid, non-dun colors of "grey" (not the same as the grey listed with dun?), "brown," (i.e. bay with the proposed sooty (gene) and black. After than they mention bay (which is genetically the same thing as "brown") and "a shade of liver chestnut with a silver mane and tail,"  which sounds like a silver dapple gene to me.

Now, let's just try to match them up to known genetics and go from there (by the way, I am cool with internationalizing the terminology of the dun articles, later, but that's a different problem)

Also, another thing that is confusing me: If many Highland ponies have the gray gene, (which makes sense), then they will ALWAYS turn gray as they age and in my book, that means that, no matter what the birth color of the animal, it is a gray. End of story. Genetically, gray trumps dun, even though both are dominant genes (meaning only one copy of the allele is needed for the color to manifest in offspring). But from looking at some of the web sites, it looks like folks spend an inordinate amount of time reclassifying color of Highlands that are nothing more than just the horse going gray as it ages. Is that accurate? (grin)

So, can either of you fill in the blanks?


 * Bay base with dun gene = (USA): Dun, Bay Dun, Zebra Dun.  (UK):  ?
 * Chestnut (red) base with dun gene = (USA): Ren dun   (UK): ?
 * Black base with dun gene = (USA): Blue dun, mouse dun, grullo, grulla. (UK): ?


 * Bay + dun + cream dilution = (USA): "Dunskin". (UK): ?
 * Chestnut + dun + cream dilution = (USA): "Dunalino".  (UK): ?
 * Black + dun + cream dilution = probably no real name because one copy of cream dilution will have no visible effect on the horse

And finally, can anyone link a good web image of a "liver chestnut with a silver mane and tail" for me to look at? Do compare to the silver dapple gene article and tell me if this is the same basic color. Montanabw (talk) 20:13, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
 * See: and  Sorry unable to comment any further at this stage. Cgoodwin (talk) 05:07, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Those are, unquestionably, simply liver chestnuts with flaxen manes and tails. Nothing more. Definitely not silver dapple.  Montanabw (talk) 05:22, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

meaning of 'garron' ?
Does anyone know more about the meaning(s)of Garron?

Please excuse me this my first wiki post, i have not worked out how to post directly to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garron

I wondered if there was any source for "generally refers to an undersized and much-despised beast"? Quoted on above page. Or anyone know which language or dialect this usage/meaning might come from?

Thanks very much people for both great articles on Garron and Highland Pony.

Silverdarling (talk) 18:35, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Hi Silverdarling. There is a publication called "Days of the Garron" by Andrew Ferguson Fraser which you may find interesting! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.75.224.98 (talk) 23:51, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

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