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Discussion on Hereditability of blue eyes?
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Member:
Alma
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Posted on Saturday, Mar 29, 2003 - 4:51 pm:
What causes blue eyes? I have heard that it is just the way the color spots fall that causes them in pintos. And I have also heard that if a horse with brown eyes has a lot of white showing around the edges of the eye, ("human eye") they are more likely to produce a foal with blue eyes when bred to a pinto with or without blue eyes. Does anyone have any information on this?
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Moderator:
DrO
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Posted on Sunday, Mar 30, 2003 - 9:10 am:
If by white around the eyes you mean the conjunctiva, no this does not influence eye color. I agree that it has to do with the way the color spots fall around the face though you do see the occasional paint or pinto horse with a brown face surrounding a blue eye. It always seemed to me this was pretty random maybe someone else has studied this phenomina.
DrO
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Member:
Erika
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Posted on Sunday, Mar 30, 2003 - 11:02 am:
Of course, I'm no expert, but I have been reading a bit about calico color in cats. Even the cloned kitty had a different spot pattern from it's "parent" cat though they have identical genes. Logic might tell one that pinto spotting could be a similar affect of the gene expression. In other words, you can breed for pinto spots, but you can't predict where they will be expressed.
One might breed for minimal white to increase chances of blue eyes, but then there's also "lethal white synDrOme" to deal with....
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Member:
Mftgirl
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Posted on Saturday, May 8, 2004 - 10:23 pm:
Although this is an older discussion, I thought this might be of interest. We have a tobiano mare, chesnut and white with one partial blue eye. She has chestnut almost completely surrounding that eye, while on the brown eye, half her eyelashes are white, the other half chestnut. The baby born to her last year had 2 blue eyes again almost completely surrounded by chestnut. This year's baby had 2 brown eyes with a mostly chestnut head with a thin blaze. I'll include pictures so you can see the difference.   I should also point out that the first baby was out of a black and white homozygous tobiano (don't know if homozygous for the black or tobiano, but am guessing for spots as our baby was a replica of mom), second baby out of a solid black horse.
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