Abstract
IN the Field for April 16, p. 582, Miss J. McAlpine gives an account of a bay horse the mane of which, black as usual in this colour, turned nearly white owing to a severe fright it received at six years of age when out at grass in a very long field. An aviator, in trying to land here, drove the horse the whole length of the field, and nearly alighted on it. No one saw the horse for three days afterwards, but it was then found to have lost the colour of its mane, as described, while the tail had also become quite grey. A photograph of the animal, now nine years old, accompanies the note, and shows the pale mane very plainly, so that the effect of the shock seems to have been permanent. The writer of this note once casually saw in a London street a bay pony with a grey mane and also an angular grey patch let in, as it were, on the brown short hair of the neck, but put it down to a freak of variation. The horse is more liable to variation in pelage than any other domestic mammal, and another bay, an aged van-horse, also seen casually in London, was spotted with white over the brown parts as clearly as any deer, but with smaller, more angular spots.
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Blanching of a Bay Horse. Nature 129, 683 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129683b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129683b0