Purple Horses

[padan_fain]

A few years ago I saw a Discovery Channel program on an ancient breed of horses that was found, I believe in the mountains of Mongolia. The horse was a very heavy-looking horse, thick with a big mane. The other thing about it is that it had a distinct shade of purple. Not completely purple, but enough to where you could rightfully call it a purple horse. I informed one of my friends about this, but he does not believe me, and to be honest, I’m starting to doubt it myself, since I have not been able to find any pictures of said horses. Can someone help me out? Cecil? ANYONE?? Are there horses with shades of purple in them?

[Polycarp]

Nope, at least not what you’re talking about. (I’m resisting temptation to paraphrase Gelett Burgess here.) The horse in question is Przewalski’s Horse, as discussed on the website of the foundation dedicated to preserving them.

A quote on description and coloration from that page:

The Przewalski is a heavily built horse. It stands typically between 12 and 14 hands. Its color is beige-brown or dun with a light colored muzzle. It has a black stripe over its back, called “eel-stripe” and stripes across its legs like a zebra. It has an upright mane, which unlike a Fjord pony’s, does not fall over if it is not cut. The mane stops between the ears, hence the Przewalski horse has no forelock. The tail of the Przewalski is also different from the domestic horse. In the domestic horse the hairs on the tail start at the top, tight where the tail is implanted on the body, but the Przewalski horse, as in the asses, the dock hairs are short and the longer hairs only start lower down. In a sandstorm he would turn his head with eyes and nose away from the fierce wind and the driven sand grains and protect the vulnerable parts of his rear with the tail. The mane and tail are dark in color.

I suspect “purple” may have resulted from a mishearing of “Przewalski” – which is pronounced, more or less, “PUR -zuh - VAHL - skee,” with the unstressed syllables almost elided over. So you would have heard “PUR-vahl” as “purple.”

[yabob]

He said he actually saw it, which makes it a horse of a different color …

[Squink]

…Which did go through a shockingly purple phase in “The Wizard of Oz” movie.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

I don’t know what breed was being referred to, but the purple color sounds like what’s called a blue roan. It’s created by a mixture of black and white hairs in the horse’s coat. Here is a link to a page with pictures of a blue roan Quarter Horse: http://www.bamahorse.com/new_page_3.htm

Here’s another link with pictures: http://www.blueroans.com/

If you want to get into the genetics of this color, here’s a link to a page with an explanation for nonexperts that I found clear and helpful: http://www.grullablue.com/roangenetics.htm

[j.c]

It might help you understand how some blue roans can look purple if I added to EddyTeddyFreddy’s list of colors - black, white and red hairs. Red roans have the same mix.

Thinks for the like, by the way, I didn’t know blue horses had their own dot.com!

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

On thinking it over, I suspect what you saw was a Mongol horse, which looks a good deal like the Przewalski horse that Polycarp mentioned. That ancient breed, however, comes in basically one color – dun. The Mongol horses can be pretty much any color one would find on a domestic breed: bay, chestnut, gray, black, etc. – so a blue roan (purple-looking) Mongol horse is a good candidate for what you saw. I don’t have my references at hand to check exactly how old a breed the horses of the Mongolians are, but you can bet they’ve been around a long time.