Accuracy and documentation

Because I show a lot of uncommon breeds (and common breeds in uncommon colors), I am a fan of providing documentation. Creating short, informative cards so that a judge can better understand what my model is intended to portray is a challenge that I enjoy. 

Here is Lascaux, the model in the picture. 

Sarah Rose's Libretto painted by Kim Naumann

I show Lascaux (and other horses with Iberian type and appaloosa patterning) as Spanish Spotted Saddle Horses. Because that is a relatively new breed, and because the name is easily confused with the (very different!) Spotted Saddle Horse, providing documentation with the entry is important.

The Spotted Saddle Horse is an American gaited breed closely related to the Tennessee Walking Horse

 

Here is a close-up of Lascaux's documentation. It is typical of the documentation I use as a shower, and I prefer to see when I judge. It covers the very specific information I believe the judge needs to put the entry in context; it is not a book report on the breed.

I have written a lot of articles and a handful of books about breeds and colors over the years, but it never occurred to me to offer pre-made show documentation. I know that others have begun doing this, though, because entrants have told me they purchased their documentation. I learned this when I asked about incorrect information, and the answer was, "Oh, I did not write that." 

Usually, the errors are minor. I have joked that I am going to make custom Post-it notes that say, "This is not a silver," to attach to all the misidentified photos. Using sooty palomino or liver chestnut to illustrate the existence of silver dilutes in a breed is not going to change a placing—assuming, of course, that the breed really does have silver dilutes. 

Nope, not a silver!

Also not a silver.

More recently, however, I encountered documentation with errors that were on a completely different level. I am always hesitant to share details about negative situations because I do not believe publicly shaming someone is helpful. In this case, however, even I do not know who created the documentation. The exhibitor said she received it with the model. What I do know, though, is that it opened my eyes to the potential for a problem. 

That's because the phrase I usually hear right after "I did not write that" is "But the horse placed well using this at the last show."

As judges, we often take documentation at face value. After all, the whole point of laying down documents is to give a judge information that they might not already have. We expect almost encyclopedic knowledge from our judges, but there is so much out there. Documentation is supposed to help make the job more manageable. 

But what if judges cannot trust what is provided? What if exhibitors, or documentation writers, are just making things up? 

The "tobiano" Finnhorse

The model in question was a copy of Emilia Kurila's Ukko, painted in buckskin tobiano. He was being shown as a Finnhorse with documentation that claimed that the breed could be pinto-patterned. That is not untrue. Finnhorses sometimes have flashy white markings, and some do have belly spotting. There is even one instance of a dominant white stallion with a near-white phenotype. 

Vekselin Ihme, a near-white Finnhorse born from two chestnut parents

This is also the breed where splashed white was originally described in 1933. Although the color was thought to have been lost, it was later confirmed to be present in modern Finnhorses by testing. 

Illustration from the 1931 paper that first described splashed white

Finnhorses do not, however, have the gene for tobiano. The idea behind Valto Klemola's 1933 paper was that there were two different kinds of pinto, one dominant (what we now call tobiano) and one recessive (what we now call Splashed White 1). The form of splashed white present in the Finnhorses, Splashed White 1 (SW1), behaves in an incompletely dominant fashion. Horses with one copy look like they have 'ordinary markings', which is why Klemola thought of it as recessive. The horses looked like pintos when they had two copies of SW1. That was what made it different from the dominant (tobiano) pinto. 

Klemola used pictures of Scottish cart horses (the article was written while he was at the University of Edinburgh) to illustrate the tobiano pattern. The splashed white horses were descendants of the Finnhorse stallion Eversti. The whole point of the discovery was that there was a pinto pattern in Finnhorses that was not tobiano. 

Needless to say, finding a tobiano Finnhorse on the table was not something I expected. Finding documentation claiming this horse was proof was something else entirely. 

The documentation claimed that the horse in the picture was "Gold Charm," a Finnhorse stallion "standing at Blazing Colours Farm." None of these things are true. 

I recognized the horse. That's El Dorado Gold Charm. You can see this picture and more from the same photo shoot here. He is a registered American Saddlebred. I knew about him because one of his tobiano lines (he is homozygous) is a bit of a mystery. He's also buckskin, which (unlike palomino) is a little uncommon in his breed. 

The real eye-opener was the claim that he belonged to Blazing Colours Farm. A lot of model horse hobbyists might recognize that name. More would likely recognize it if they saw the stallion at the center of their logo. 

That is Sato, the 2011 BreyerFest Guest Horse. Blazing Colours breeds colorful Thoroughbreds and sport horses. They do not breed coldblooded trotting breeds like the Finnhorse. Interestingly enough, they do have a cremello Thoroughbred stallion named El Dorado, but not Gold Charm. 

The documentation not only named the farm, but also provided a link. Because everything about the claims was throwing huge red flags, I did check the link. It was dead. (Most judges do not have access to the internet while judging, so do not do this on your documentation!)

The whole incident left me deeply uneasy. Horses with incorrect breed attributions have become increasingly common thanks to sites like Pinterest. What made this one unusual was the full-page backstory that went with its breed designation. I could not figure out how someone could mistakenly identify a buckskin tobiano Saddlebred stallion as a Finnhorse (a coldblooded trotting breed) owned by a famous Thoroughbred farm in Canada. 

I still do not know how the documentation came together, but I would like to urge entrants to check the accuracy of anything they did not personally create. As much as I dislike saying it, I would also recommend that judges not necessarily take papers next to entries at face value. At a time when what is real and what is not is harder than ever to determine, it doesn't hurt to be a little skeptical.