Grays Carrying Cream

So you buy a model horse lot or set, and one of them is a boring gray Quarter Horse. How do you spice him up? Make him a gray perlino!

But how do you know what a gray is carrying? If it is a homozygous gray, you may never know without a genetics test, because all of their foals will be gray and hide their true color. If it is heterozygous gray, bred to a base color, and produces a cream, that is a pretty good clue it's a dilute under the gray! Another hint is if it's a gray, bred to a dilute, and produces a double dilute.

Good old Yahoo search with the terms "gray carrying cream Quarter Horse" unearthed a few possibilities, all too young for the year I need for my stallion (1991).

Strait Silver Badge is a 1998 gray, bred to a palomino, that produced a cremello. His gray-carrying sire produced only grays and bays, according to allbreed, so there is no real suggestion he also carried the cream gene. His dam was a palomino, so was most likely the one to pass on the cream.

The next one I found was an ad for a 2002 gray stallion who produced a palomino filly out of a chestnut mare. http://www.equinenow.com/horse-ad-209155. Way too young for my purposes, but I'm just warming up my search.

I came across a mare with a whole smorgasbord of colors, Blue Boon Bar. http://www.horseville.com/php/view.php?id=281921 . Her ad says she was tested and results were EeaaCrcrRrGg. That means she has gray, cream, and roan going on! But since she is only heterozygous gray, she has the possibility of producing cream+roan foals without the gray cover. But, her cream came from the sire's side, opposite the gray.

Then I found Demand the Cash, a gray with a buckskin base color: http://mthorsesoregon.tripod.com/id14.html. He is 2003, again too young, but then his dam caught my attention. Cinda Sierra is a gray 1980 mare with a gray sire and a blue roan mare. But Demand the Cash's sire is brown, so the mare *had* to contribute the cream. Her gray sire, Sierra Scoot, was by a buck sire out of a gray mare, proving the cream is possible in the line. But does Cinda Sierra carry roan, as well, contributed from her mother? I guess I'll never know, because allbreed shows only two foals, and the second doesn't have a color listed, and roan is present in the sire line, so there would be no way to know where the roan came from if it popped up further down the line (i.e. in her foal's progeny).

Now, just need to throw in a cream-colored sire, and I'm good to go! Heck, I could even find a cream/roan one if I feel so inclined. ;)