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Coat Markings

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The Horse Course: Introduction to Basic Care and Management

University of Florida

4.9 (454 ratings) | 24K Students Enrolled

There are over 100 million horses, donkeys and mules in the world today and owners of these animals can be found on almost every continent and in almost every society. The Horse Course will cover many unique aspects of equine ownership and touch upon the science behind many of today’s management practices.

Skills You'll Learn

Disease Management, Nutrition, Animal Behavior, Vital Signs

Reviews

4.9 (454 ratings)

5 stars
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AK

Jun 25, 2017

Such a good informative course about Equids. I look at them in a completely different way now, than how I used to see them earlier. All credits to the course and the Professor.

AL

Jun 04, 2016

Excellent course! The course content was informative and the instructor kept the flow going at a nice pace and was interesting to listen to. I highly recommend this course!

From the lesson

Basic Equine Physiology

This week will start out with covering some basic physiology. We will then advance into hoof anatomy and care. This will lead to spending a lecture discussing laminitis, a serious hoof condition in horses and other equids. The final two lectures will jump into the various coat colors and markings in horses.

Coat Colors14:07

Coat Markings10:48

Taught By

Chris J. Mortensen, Ph.D.
Professor

Transcript

[BLANK_AUDIO]

All right.

Welcome back, and in this next lecture, we're going to talk about coat markings.

So you know really again, the two areas that we're going to

look at is, is the face, and then also the leg.

So we're going to kind of walk through this, and, and give

you the verbiage on what we call different markings on the face.

So, you know, looking at this image, at the end of this lecture,

you should easily be able to identify all of these markings on these horses.

So, the first marking is what we call a star.

And, these can be really subtle, really light, I

mean, sometimes you just see some white hair in there.

Or, they can be what I call bold,

they're really bright, you know, really, really there.

So, you know, in this image, this would be a faint

one and then this one would be like a really bold star.

And if you wanted to see what this looked like on, you know, actual horses.

So, here's one where it's just a very faint star, this one's kind of middle

of the road, and not all the time,

you know, they're, they're going to be different patterns.

They're, they're always not circular.

And then here's one with a pretty bold star right there.

That, that's pretty out there, I mean, you, you

can see that and you're like, Oh, that's a star.

So, that's what we call, you know, any

marking, you know, between the eyes and the forehead.

And then we'll go, we'll jump down to the, to the

lips of the horse and then we call this a snip.

So you can see here between the nasal bones or

the upper lip of the horse, we call these snips.

And again, they can be either really, really

bold or they can be really, really subtle.

Again with these two, you know, obviously here too.

You can see, really there's no more white

markings on that, that's just snips on the horse.

And that's what we call that.

And then the middle one, is a strip, or sometimes some people call a it stripe.

Which, either or is okay.

And the white is between the nasal bone.

So if you look at the nasal bone of the horse

here and here, you can see the white in between that.

So when, when we do see that then it's a strip or a stripe.

Okay.

And again here, this horse is pretty bold, but again, still

between the nasal bones we would still call that a strip.

Now with most horses it's, you know, they're going to

have a, a combination of these on the face.

They're, they're either going to have one or two or all three.

And we also call these, you know,

we either say they're continuous or non-continuous.

So continuous is, you know, the best example All three, or all four of these,

here, are continuous where, you know, you have the star, the strip, and the snip.

So in all three of them, it's, they're all running together.

Noncontinuous is, is the example right here, where you do have

a star, you do have a strip, and you do have a snip, but it's, it's broken.

So if you wanted to see this again on, on

real horses, here's one with a continuous star strip snip.

Okay, and then on this foal you have a star and a

strip, and then on this horse you have a star and a snip.

Okay.

So, pretty easy with the facial markings.

Now, the one where people sometimes get confused

and that's between a strip and a blaze.

Okay.

A blaze, we consider it a blaze anytime that white

starts to either meet or exceed outside those nasal bones.

So this picture is a pretty clear definition of what we would call blaze.

Now again, seeing this on, on live horses, this one here you

can definitely see that it's got the flaxen mane, mane and tail.

You can see it's outside the nasal bones, it's

clearly a blaze, and that's we call a blaze.

Now this, it gets a little tricky, you know,

once you get these horses that again are in between.

Maybe somebody would say star, strip, snip.

Okay.

I mean you can get away with that.

But again, you know, this you would

probably clearly define as a blaze because it's

meet in the nasal bones or exceeding a little bit of the nasal bones there.

So that's what a blaze would look like.

Now there's, there's some really cool white

markings too that, that have some special nomenclature.

And the first is a bald face so you can see this full.

Where the white blaze extends past the eyes, so you know, all of

the white is in the face, and we call that a bald face.

And then the next one is really neat too, and that's called an apron.

And this is where you get, you know, it, it, again, it's called

an apron because it looks like somebody put an apron over their face.

Where you get the white running up

almost underneath the throat latch with this horse.

So that's what we call an apron.

And then one of my favorites.

I, I think this one's always great too, is called the medicine hat.

And you can see it's just the dark areas

around the, the top of the head and the ears.

So there, and if they have that, we call that a medicine hat.

So I think it's, I think it's really cool, I think it's really cool marking.

So the, that's kind of the, you know, sums up most

of the facial markings that, that are most common amongst horses.

The next is the leg markings, and we're going to work our way up.

So we'll start at the hoof and work our way up the leg And the first

one is when you just have some white just along the hoof, or just above the hoof.

So we either call them a white heel

or, or you'll sometimes hear the term ermine marks.

And in this next image, in these next two images you can clearly see

where the white is along the heel here, so that's pretty clearly a white heel.

And then, here you can see there's some white here, white here.

And it's kind of non continuous.

Kindof spotty around there.

And those we would probably call ermine marks.

So when there's just a little bit of white above the hoof.

Now, if it is continuous runs all along the hoof,

of the bottom of the hoof, around that coronary band.

Remember, this is where that anatomy kind of helps to, to remember

because a lot of these markings on the leg refer to the anatomy.

And when there's just some white, just above that, but really

not too far up the pasture, we would call that a coronet.

Now, the next one is when you do have white running up the

coronet, but does...or excuse me, from the coronet up the pastern, but stops

at the fetlock here, so you can see it runs all the way

up the pastern but stops at the fetlock, and we'll call that a pastern.

Now this one you can see it's half way up

the pastern and some of the white runs up here.

So you kind of see that so I'll make a little boot.

So there you go.

So you can see where some of that white runs up.

Some people may say that's a partial pastern because it almost

looks like a cornet, but you have some white running up it.

They would call that a partial pastern.

So, again looking on a live animal, or what would be in a live animal,

rather than in a picture, there you can see what is clearly marked a pastern.

Now, when it does go above the fetlock, that's when we would call it a fetlock,

or sometimes you have that white running up

partially, some people may call that a partial fetlock.

So, here.

You can see here where it's about the fetlock joint.

So here's the fetlock joint here, and it's above it.

Almost a sock, which is our next one, but not quite.

So we would probably call that a fetlock.

Now a sock, what we call a sock is generally when

the white runs up about half-way up the canon bone, okay.

But does not go up above the knee on the front legs, or the hawk on the hind leg.

So this is the hock on the hind legs.

So the white is almost halfway up, but doesn't

exceed there, so that's what we would call a sock.

So again looking at these horses, you can see the cannon

bone halfway, halfway, that's a sock, halfway, halfway, those are socks.

Now again, if it ran up here, you can see here again drawn that.

Weird looking boot there.

You can see where you know that would be still a sock

so not quite the next one which is called a, a stocking.

So a stocking is when it actually reaches the hock or the knees or goes above it.

So here's what we call a stocking And then here on,

on the left is clear two stockings on the hind legs.

So that's what we would call a stocking.

Now this next one, we do have a stocking here, okay.

So here's the knees, okay so that white is meeting

the knees, but this one doesn't extend past the knees.

Now there's a little bit of white here, but not

quite, so this one we would probably still call a sock.

And then, this one we would call a stocking, okay?

Now the final thing we'll talk about with identification is these

weird things called chestnuts, or some people call them night eyes.

And again, this is what's so cool about horses or equids you know,

donkeys have these to, is they, they think this is a remnant from evolution.

Where, you know, if we remember, we went

from four, to three, to a single toed animal.

And those, those toes migrated up the leg.

Well, they believe these, these chestnuts, it's kind of just a, a remnant of that.

That that's still kind of around.

And what, what a lot of people believe, too, is that these

really unique, each one's unique to

a horse where they're almost like fingerprints.

Now, they do grow a little bit, so they do, they,

they can scuff off kind of the dead skin on there.

But some breed registries actually do require photographs.

And like the jockey club in certain circumstances will

actually require photography, you know somebody have to go

in there and take a photograph of those night

eyes as a, a unique mark to that animal.

So just be aware, you've always wondered what

those weird things were, that's what they are.

So that concludes the end of week two and you know again this week we talked a

lot about hoof anatomy, you know laminitis, hoof care

and then jumped into coat markings and coat colors.

So just remind to take, take quiz two.

The quiz questions come directly from the lectures and the slides so they

should be very, very straightforward if

you've been paying attention and taking notes.

And also complete assignment one, so that's going to be

due before week three which shouldn't take you a whole heck

of a lot of time and you, I made a video

to clearly explain what the expectations should be for that assignment.

And then you're going to be asked to do a peer evaluation.

Of three, of at least three, of your peers that

you can go in there and look at their assignments.

Give them feedback, give them a score,

and that's going to be due by the end of week

three, the beginning of week four.

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