A horse with a patchy coloration that includes white. Chick Norris again leads pinto bean stew Mounted Patrol”, in Boys’ Life, page 10. Tesouro do léxico patrimonial galego e portugués, Santiago de Compostela: Instituto da Lingua Galega.

This page was last edited on 21 January 2023, at 00:17. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This article is about a coat color of horses. A pinto horse has a coat color that consists of large patches of white and any other color. The distinction between “pinto” and “solid” can be tenuous, as so-called “solid” horses frequently have areas of white hair. Various cultures throughout history appear to have selectively bred for pinto patterns.

Many breeds of horses carry pinto patterns. Pinto coloring, known simply as “coloured” in nations using British English, is the most popular in the United States. Pinto patterns are visually and genetically distinct from the leopard complex spotting patterns characteristic of horse breeds such as the Appaloosa. Breeders who select for color are often careful not to cross the two patterns, and registries that include spotting color preferences often refuse registration to horses that exhibit characteristics of the “wrong” pattern. The word pinto is Spanish for “painted”, “dappled”, or “spotted”. While pinto coloration has yet to be identified as a wildtype by DNA studies or seen in cave art antedating horse domestication, images from pottery and other art of ancient antiquity show horses with flashy, spotted patterns, indicating that they may have been desirable traits and selectively bred for.

By the 17th century in Europe, spotted horses were quite fashionable, though when the fad ended, large numbers of newly unsellable horses were shipped to the Americas, some of which were sold, while others were simply turned loose to run wild. A number of words describe the various color and spotting patterns of pinto horses. Essentially, a pinto horse is genetically created when an allele for a spotting pattern is present. The genes that create the underlying base coat color are not related to the genes that create white spotting. Coloured: The term for pinto coloration in nations using BE, it includes both piebald and skewbald.