Talk:Fjord horse

Colors

We should somehow introduce the idea that there are more genetic combinations possible than the breed standard recognises, and that the breed's colour terms don't always correspond directly to the horse's genetical color. Take cream-diluted mouse dun for instance. Most probably registered as a dark "brunblakk". Pitke (talk) 11:41, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

I kind of did that with the final paragraph of the color section, but we can improve on it if needed, as long as we don't go overboard. You are correct in concept, but in the case of your example, a heterozygous cream diluted grullo would actually still just be a grullo, just as a heterozygous ream diluted black is just a smoky black -- the cream dilution doesn't affect black hairs until it's homozygous (the difference between a buckskin and a perlino being an example -- the smoky black/smoky cream change being the most dramatic. It doesn't appear that dun does the pseudo-double-dilute thing like a pearl/cream cross does. Fascinating and very weird. Montanabw^(talk) 21:33, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Your last round of edits was better, and thanks for locating "live" links -- I think these are the same basic articles as the earlier refs, I guess NFHR redid its web site and changed the URLs. Which happens ;-P. Montanabw^(talk) 04:25, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

I have to disagree about the unaffected phenotype of a single cream factor not diluting black hair. Viitanen explains that the smoky black is a nasty colour to recognise because it can resemble sunbleached black, seal brown, and liver chestnut. She mentions that lighter, brownish smoky blacks are most common in draft horse and pony breeds. I've seen the "sneaky smoky cream effect" happening in ample-coated breeds, mainly the Icelandic horse. This picture is the only identified smoky black on Commons at the moment, and doesn't he look just like a bay. His registration has a wrong colour, buckskin if memory serves. this mare is another good example; she is registerer as liver chestnut (sysirautias, sysrt), but must be a cream dilute since her dam is a double cream dilute. Pitke (talk) 13:22, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

I may have spoken too broadly to say that it never affects black hair at all, but it has far less influence on black. For example, in the buckskin, it clearly leaves the mane alone, and I agree that some (though not all) smoky blacks can look sunbleached or bay, and the longer, coarser-coated animals do seem to be affected the most dramatically. Light riding horses usually are quite black (you have this with Morgans and Quarter horses, particularly) What you are saying about smoky black is essentially correct, though from what I see. Vitanen, however, is losing credibility with me pretty fast after defining champagne foals as palominos, I'm afraid. The problem with all of these is, of course, that coat color DNA tests are $40 a pop. I wish some day they'd just become universal along with parentage testing (which many registries now require) so we'd all know for sure. I have a dream...

I still feel the need to advocate Viitanen's writing. What seems to bother you is the foal coat part of her passage on palomino. I'd like to repeat, she mentions apricot-coloured foals as exceptions that occur in certain breeds that cannot have champagne. What I have written might have distorted the message - "some breeds may have palomino foals that [champagne traits]" can really give an impression of "QH and some other American warmblood breeds etc." even if the meaning would be "some breeds that are known to not carry the champagne factor may have palomino foals that [champagne traits]. However, these foals mature into regular palominos." That Viitanen has replaced what should have been a description about palominos with a full description of golden champagne is an impression - based on my omissions during my writing stuff on the Wikipedia article. I cannot stress this enough. When something sound odd my translation should be always be the first thing to be discussed. I have a bad habit of trying to avoid copying the original text too hard, it shows like this.

That palomino draft or pony foals might look like champagnes — I don't see what is so dubious about that. A lot of chestnut foals look like palominos, and many bay foals have light or even whitish legs and non-black tails at first. Until a research comes up with an explanation for why some palomino foals are darker than as adults (and why some palominos get darker in the winter), we are in no position to say these foals are not palominos if they still express clearly palomino traits as adults and have positive results if DNA-tested for palomino - as they do. In general, foal coats are a confusing matter altogether, and I imagine it's a well-known fact that the foal coats on ponies and draft breeds have different traits than those of warm-blood breeds. Pitke (talk) 12:35, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

More on the palomino page. The pearl gene was only recently discovered, when homozygous, it creates an apricot colored coat. The champagne gene is also a fairly new test, more on it here. So far in the USA, Pearl only occurs in the breeds tracing to Spanish ancestry, but apparently has popped up in the Lusitano in Europe as well, so who is to say that these genes didn't also get into the Scandanavian lines somehow? Mutations are, well, mutations. Can happen any time, and as all the odd colors of the Icelandics suggest, they probably go waaaaaaay back even in very closed, purebred breeds. The light guard hairs thing on bays is definitely a real phenemenon, but it's on the points, and if you've seen newborn black foals, they are VERY odd -- at least in the Arabian (the only black newborns I've seen) the blacks are born with light guard hairs all over their bodies and look dun! They don't look black until they shed their baby coats (unless you shave them early, whatever grows back is black). It's a perpetual whine amongst breeders, if they have a foal black at birth,they get all excited, but it inevitably will be a bay or, if there is a gray parent, they will be gray. Montanabw^(talk) 21:21, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Ref bizzos

On seeing the "dead link" tag for <ref name="Albrough">Albrough, Lori. "The Colors of the Norwegian Fjordhorse" Web page, accessed August 12, 2007 at [http://www.nfhr.com/Colors.htm]</ref>, I pared the url back to the parent site (http://www.nfhr.com), from where you can access the sub-pages, including colours from the About the breed link. I couldn't see any author named Lori Albrough though, so you may want to change that. However, I leave you to amend the reference as you see fit. At least you can take care of the dead-link bizzo. Cheers Wotnow (talk) 09:01, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up, but don't just change the link because that falsifies the source, either just leave it tagged or try to actually find replacement material, OK? I'll find something. Some new articles there, even more interesting than before... Sponenberg has weighed in there, he's a leading color geneticist. Montanabw^(talk) 04:04, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Cheers. I see you took care of the dead-link bizzo. I figured you'd probably get there more readily than me because you have some familiarity with the topic and material. Looking at the above pages, I could easily see that I could construct a direct correlation between the sentence "all Fjord horses are dun", and an updated citation. The About the breed link for example appears to allow that extrapolation, stating 90% are dun, and then describing the remaining 10% as dun variations. A bit like a 'dun-deal', one might say (okay, I did say it). The previous link to the same site was from 2007, and despite any updates, and even though we (or at least I) don't know what the 2007 site text said, we know this particular set of facts (dun colouration) remains broadly, ah, stable. The author bit wasn't critical. If visible author, then cite, else, don't - that sort of thing. The main difference then appears to be the change from htm to php format, which would have made for the dead link. Nevertheless, I figured one of the editors more familiar with the article and source material would prefer to make the change, because you could simultaneously consider any other changes you thought worthwhile. Regards Wotnow (talk) 05:43, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

No problem, but let me clarify your comments above: It is believed that today, 100% of modern Fjords are dun! 90% of Fjords are "brown dun" (i.e. what the rest of us call "bay dun" or "classic" dun or "zebra dun", and the most common form of dun in all breeds) and the other 10% are other kinds of dun -- ALL are dun, the variations are caused by different underlying base coat colors bay, black and chestnut, (see dun gene for the details), plus Fjords also picked up a cream dilution somewhere too, hence the "yellow" and "white" duns. Sponenberg article on the Fjord registry site backs this, though he says it indirectly, a wise caveat, as 100% is probably impossible to prove unless you genetically tested every single horse for color (and the the only dun gene test currently available only is used for Quarter horses and even that one is still in development), there may be a heterozygote or two out there who might meet up someday and make fools of everyone, just like it is rare but not impossible for a chestnut Friesian horse to occasionally pop up.) Equine coat color genetics is absolutely fascinating, and then when the Fjord folks turn all the terminology used by everyone else on its head, it just makes for too much fun (an odd sort of fun, but fun). Montanabw^(talk) 05:58, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Cheers. Indeed, I would have thought that it is impossible not to conclude that 100% Fjords are dun from the following sentences: "approximately 90% of all Fjord Horses are brown dun in color. The other 10% are either red dun, gray, white or "uls" dun, or yellow dun." For this reason, I have added the appropriate citation to the opening statement in the Color section, as it is more direct than the existing citation. I did not remove the existing one, as I think they are complementary. One citation states in no uncertain terms that all Fjord horses are dun or dun variations, justifying the opening statement, while the other provides photographic descriptions for the reader's benefit. Wotnow (talk) 22:07, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Works for me. Given that we had some source misread the same and claim some Fjords are brown, I have decided that there is no such thing as footnote overkill in wiki-land! Montanabw^(talk) 00:57, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Engvar

The flavour of English for this particular article was clearly established with the first edit. Per WP:ENGVAR, I'll make changes and tag accordingly. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:52, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Um, that's kind of silly: " norvegian " Really? You want ENGVAR to sound like the chef? Seriously, if we are going to get along now, let's not get too wound up here. I did a crapload of work on this article (several years ago, yes) to figure out all the stuff about the weird color naming and such. If there is a significant Fjord horse presence in the UK, we can certainly discuss if UK English is more suitable, and I'm not going to edit war over the issue, but given the popularity of the breed in the USA I don't see any reason not to reach a consensus to use US English, (we can always do that) given that the breed is Norwegian, making the native language issue moot ;-) . Montanabw^(talk) 21:12, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

GA?

JLAN, any interest in getting this article to GA status? It actually should be pretty easy, given that we have a lot of sources. Montanabw^(talk) 21:17, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Potential sources to review

• Odd Vangen. "fjordhest". Store norske leksikon.
• Melanie Huggett (August 2009). "Norwegian Fjordhorse". Horse Journals.
• "Norwegian Fjord Horse". International Museum of The Horse.
• "Fjordhesten". Norges Fjordhestlag.
• McCue ME, Bannasch DL, Petersen JL, Gurr J, Bailey E, et al. (2012) A High Density SNP Array for the Domestic Horse and Extant Perissodactyla Utility for Association Mapping, Genetic Diversity, and Phylogeny Studies. PLoS Genet 8(1): e1002451. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002451

Article Structure, and pictures have to be replanned!

The article has to be overworked. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fjord_horse&oldid=1124158444 | https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fjord_horse&oldid=1124211706 . The infobox had better information, before the last edits. That pictures have better qualities. Before having some editwar, you should accept the better pictures and the better infobox. eG. Fjordhorse is correcter then Fjord, because that stands for some water only! 91.184.164.227 (talk) 21:55, 27 November 2022 (UTC)