Cream Horses

What is Cream?
The Cream gene is known as a dilution gene, because it's phenotypic action is to dilute the body color. Specifically, the Cream gene works primarily to "dilute" or lighten hairs with red pigment (called "pheomelanin").

The Cream gene will cause a chestnut horse to become Palomino and a Bay horse to become Buckskin. Not all Pseudo-Albino or Homozygous Cream horses look alike. If the underlying base color is Chestnut, the resulting white/cream color may also be referred to as "Cremello". When the underlying base color is Bay, the individual may have smudgy or "dirty" points... that is, lower legs, mane and tail... and that shade is often referred to as "Perlino"

In its heterozygous form, the Cream allele has only a minimal effect on black pigment (eumelanin). A black horse carrying a Cream allele, may appear to be "Smoky Black"... rather than an intense black. This may not always be noticed (may look dark bay or brown)... and may result in the horse "surprising" everyone by producing buckskin (and possibly palomino) offspring.

Homozygous Cream on Black results in "Perlino" type coloring... pink skin, blue eyes, cream coat possibly with darker cream points.

For purposes of this example, we are going to concentrate primarily on Palomino coloring.

There are two alleles at the Cream locus, and they are usually annotated as:
C = Normal color
CCr = Cream color

The result of the Cream allele on Chesnut is Palomino and on Bay color is a Buckskin. In the heterozygous form, the Cream allele lightens only the red body color, leaving the points black.

Some years back, the Palomino breeders, wanted to establish a breed of palomino colored horses. However, they soon found out that there was no way for Palomino color to "breed true"... that is, where palomino horses would always produce palomino offspring.

The following chart will show you why :

As you can see, only half of the offspring are palomino. Because the coloring is based on the heterozygous condition, it is impossible to establish a trait such as this that will "breed true" in all the offspring.

Based on the chart, the relative "probabilities" to obtain Palomino color from two Palomino parents are:
25% Chestnut (non-Cream) (CC)
50% Palomino(CCCr)
25% Cream (Pseudo-Albino) (CCrCCr)

You can obtain the same number of Palomino offspring, without ending up with a white foal, by crossing a Palomino to a Chestnut. The only way to increase your odds of Palomino color, is to cross non-cream individuals to homozygous Cream (Pseudo-Albino).

Information for this page gathered from: www.mhref.com