Little hairs everywhere

While working on the sabino roan Lirico, I've decided to take advantage of the fact that my own horse is roaned to get some good reference shots of hair growth patterns. Sprinkles is an appaloosa, of course, but I'm not really looking at the pattern of the white hair nearly so much as I am using the white hair to see the hair direction more clearly. (Though the roaning in the picture above - taken to show how the hair tends to whorl right along the crest - could just as easily be of a sabino roan or even a dark-headed roan.)





Here Sprinkles is most obviously not a roan. What I was after was how the hair changes direction on the flanks and loins, but after I took the pictures I realized that because her spots are small and plentiful, they do a rather good job of indicating the direction the hair is growing. Some appaloosa spots show a lot more skew in the direction of the hair growth (especially those with the grey gene like this little guy), but she shows enough.

(All these pictures were uploaded as huge files, in case anyone else found them useful. Hopefully the size won't cause problems for Blogger!)

I took a lot of belly shots, and at one point pulled her foreleg outward so I could get a good shot of the way the hair whorled around her armpits. (Sprinkles is a very patient horse.) It was only afterwards that I realized that laying on the ground shooting upwards at a large animal makes for some vertigo-inducing pictures. Too bad I didn't think of wetting her down so she would roll until after I got home again! I think I'll get more useful belly pictures that way. If I do, I'll post them here.