Strawberry roan
Because of the wide variety of possible shades and seasonal variations, the horse coat has given rise to an abundance of poetic terminology, often inspired by the lexical field of botany, in both English and French.
Before the possibility of genetic recognition, the strawberry roan coat was described solely on the basis of the phenotype of the horses concerned.
[4] The National Center of Textual and Lexical Resources (CNRTL by its acronym in French) defines aubère (strawberry roan) as "[referring to a horse]: Whose coat is made up of a mixture of white and chestnut hairs".
[5] The term is found in François-Antoine Pomey's Indiculus Universalis, in Georges Guillet de Saint-George's 1678 work,[6][7] in Gilles Ménage's 1694 Dictionnaire Etymologique,[8][9] and in most general dictionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries.
In his book Les Couleurs de nos souvenirs, medieval historian Michel Pastoureau highlights the poetic aspect applied to the, historical description of horse coat colors, citing this lexical field as an example.
[12][13] Historically, a large number of French nouns refer to the color of a horse coat resulting from a mixture of chestnut and white, depending on the different shades possible:[14][15] "The chestnut roan has been called mille-fleurs (hypericum flower), aubère (strawberry roan), pêchard, fleur de pêcher (peach blossom), etc.
The various shades of chestnut, combined with white in various proportions, give rise to a thousand varieties which it is impossible to designate by precise names, but whose particular accidents are easy to describe in the reports".
[16] The name péchard or mille-fleurs (hypericum flower) comes from the pinkish hue created by the mixture of red and white hairs.
[18] The official term used by the Institut français du cheval et de l'équitation (IFCE by its acronym in French) is alezan granité.
[22][17][23] For Merche, it's the dark strawberry roan that's generally called peach blossom,[22] while for Lavalard, it's the horse with a pinkish tint that gets this name.
[27] In 1910, Alfred Sturtevant published a coat genetics study on a population of American carriage horses in The Biological Bulletin, in which he identified a genetic factor for roan, which he named "R"; he noted that the coat corresponding to roan chestnut was present in less than 10% of carriage horses on the streets of New York City, but that it was never identified separately.
[31] In 1979, on the basis of birth statistics for horses expressing a roan phenotype, Harold F. Hintz and Lloyd Dale Van Vleck postulated that the gene responsible was lethal in utero in its homozygous form.
[22][17][40] Occasionally, strawberry roan horses also show corn marks, i.e. small areas where the coat remains dark, generally due to regrowth after an injury.
[25] Two strawberry roan horses are mentioned among the cavalry imported by the conquistador Hernán Cortés to the American Continent; one belonged to a certain Moron, from Vaimo, and the other to a certain Vaena, from La Trinidad.
[43] Due to its location on the KIT gene, homozygous roan theoretically cannot co-exist with a number of pinto coats, such as tobiano, sabino[43] and dominant white.
According to sinologist Françoise Aubin's translation, the Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione (known as Lang Shining, 1688–1766) painted a "white strawberry roan horse adapted for mountain walking" (in Manchu, Kulkuri suru and in Mongolian, Riditu čayan).
[55] Fulanic epic tales from Mali mention a long-listed strawberry roan horse belonging to a Fulani from Djelgôdji (1705–1827).
[57] Chor bard Vladimir Tannagašev (1932-2007) noted among his recorded epics Kyryk kulaš synnyg kara sar'attyg Kan-Mergen, or "Khan-Mergen (tr) to the dark strawberry roan horse of forty fathoms".
