Fantastic Colors of Horses

Fantastic Colors of Horses

By Michelle Higdon

Horses come in all shapes, sizes and colors – a lot like people.  In the horse world, there are many different colors of horses.  The three most common colors are bay, chestnut, and gray.

Chance, pictured below, is a bay horse.  A horse with a bay coat is usually dark brown but the colors can go from light brown to dark brown.  Most of the time, a bay horse has a black mane and tail, and the bottoms of their legs are usually black.  Chance’s mane and tail are both black.

Sparky, below, is a chestnut horse with a white blaze on his face.  A chestnut horse is usually reddish-colored with no black marks anywhere on the body.  Their manes and tails are the same color as their coats or maybe a little lighter.  And, like Sparky, a lot of chestnut horses have white markings, either on their faces or their legs.

The third most common coat color is gray, like Prymie, pictured below.  Gray horses actually have black skin and white hair.  Gray horses are born with dark coats that lighten over time and grow whiter as they get older.  Sometimes they can become almost pure white but they are still called gray horses.  Prymie’s whole body looks like her head in the picture.  She is very light gray with a darker gray mane and tail.

So you see?  All horses are similar even though they can come in lots of different colors.

Michelle Higdon is a junior at North Greenville University and is a history education major.  She is on the staff of  the school’s literary magazine, The Mountain Laurel.  Her fiction short story, The Wall, will appear in the 2011  Mountain Laurel. Michelle is also under contract for a short nonfiction biography that will appear in a compilation work entitled Dictionary of Literary Biography:  War Correspondents of the Second World War.