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. 

The scourge of AI slop

Every equine artist I know collects reference pictures. My own collection numbers in the hundreds of thousands. I started collecting images in the late 1970s, cutting out magazine pictures and "relocating" my favorite horse libraries one xerox at a time. 

But the internet was a game-changer. That was when my reference collection went from several boxes of papers to a box of external hard drives. 

In the past, the biggest issue with using the internet to collect reference pictures was misidentified breeds or colors. That changed with generative AI. Now, realistic-looking photos can be fake. That is what the image at the top of this post is. Here it is with the original. 

That's the Arabian stallion Marwan Al Shaqab. Because he's a well-known horse, and that's one of the more recognizable images of him, quite a few people pointed out that this was an artificially generated image. 

That probably won't stop artists from painting models with patterns based on the image, or judging from encountering documentation showing that "pinto Arabians can look like this." Interesting photos spread through the model horse community. Trying to get the word out that one of them is misleading can be an uphill battle. 

Just ask me how many times I've talked about the horse on the left, and how often I still see his picture on documentation. No, he is not a buckskin silver. He is a cream-diluted horse turning grey. The horse on the right is a silver-diluted buckskin. 

Silver and cream interact, making the black areas of the horse look warm and brown (right) rather than cool and silver (left).

At least Alen's Smokey Bandit—the buckskin grey Tennessee Walking Horse—is a real horse. 

 At the moment, there are still things that tell someone when an image isn't a real horse. Probably the most consistent error is headgear. The programs do not recognize that there are two different groups of equipment—halters and bridles—so it tends to merge the two things. Even more telling, though, is that it cannot seem to distinguish bits from other metal hardware. Lead clips are likewise a mystery to it.

If the unrealistic appaloosa pattern wasn't instantly suspicious, the "snaffle bit as halter ring" is a good giveaway that this image is fake.

Generative AI struggles with pinto faces, and often substitutes "white grey with markings" in areas that would have pink skin.

But as AI-generated images get more sophisticated, artists—and anyone trying to evaluate realism in art —are going to face challenges. It will not be long before very convincing images, and even videos, will be out there. Eventually, the consistent "tells" will improve. 

Evaluating images

As AI-generated images become increasingly difficult to identify visually, how can artists avoid using misleading references? 

Here are my rules of thumb:

1. Professional-looking photos are usually marked by a photographer. Look for a signature or logo. Be on the lookout for partially removed watermarks; they are more common in AI images than you might expect. (See the first image on this post for an example.) 
   
   
2. Generally speaking, you want to see a clear connection between the horse pictured and the account posting the image. That might mean the poster is the owner, breeder, breed association, event, or photographer.
   
   
3. Look for motivation for sharing. Is the horse being offered for sale or promoted at stud? Is the owner sharing a recent success? Are they asking for input about color, ancestry, or breeding? Posts using AI images are often clearly trolling for engagement. (Responding to them is a great way to get the scammy "Forgive me, but I noticed how clever/pretty/interesting you were and just had to reach out..." replies.)
   
   
   
4. Look for a name. Owners and breeders usually identify their horses. Sometimes you'll need to find the original post to see this text. It may not be visible when viewing photos using the "media" tab.
   
   
5. Unless you are looking at historical photos, be somewhat cautious if you only find one image of a particular horse. 

Captions from AI images (left) often include emojis and hashtags. Captions for real horses (right) usually have identifying information.

Reliable images

Here is an example of an unusual pattern reference that checks all five "likely real" boxes. 

I should note that while this breed, the Freiberger, is known to have a dominant white mutation (W1), the expression of that pattern is typically all-white or near-white. There has also been an unusual splashed white Freiberger with a sabino-like pattern, though that horse was sterile.

This type of patterning, which falls within what I call the "patchy sabino" phenotype, is not something I have seen in W1 Freibergers—or any Freibergers to date.

However, the images are watermarked by the photographer (#1). The group where this first appeared, Freibergerpferde suchen (Seeking Freiberger Horses), is run by a non-profit that helps breeders find buyers (#2). The motivation for the post is, obviously, to sell the foal (#3). The foal's name, sire, and damsire are all listed in the description (#4). Finally, there are multiple images of what is clearly the same colt (#5). Those facts make this a much more reliable reference for painters than the image at the top of this post.

Collect from reliable sources

General interest horse groups on social media—and particularly Facebook—are some of the worst offenders for providing steady streams of fake images. If the group has the adjective "Beautiful" followed by a horse-related noun, or an adjective followed by "Stallions", or "Love" anywhere in the title, it's probably best to treat images there with a lot of skepticism. 

Facebook can still be a good source for reference images if you know where to look. What I look for are the following types of groups:

• Breed associations
• Breed appreciation sites (this one requires caution, especially for color breeds)
• Breeder pages
• Equine photographers
• Breed-specific color groups
• Breed history groups

I am also a big believer in looking beyond social media sites. Some of the best resources for reference images are auction catalogs, sales videos, and stallion directories, all of which are typically found on independent websites. 

A list of reliable image sources

Social media sites are a lot more likely to push AI-generated content into user's feeds. There are good resources for photos, but it takes some work to find them. With that in mind, I am assembling a list of reliable sources from the categories I've listed above. Once that is finished, the list will be added to the blog's "pages" list with the Horse Breed Reference List.