HGG Community Forums

DP is Dense Pheomelanin. This basically means “dark red”. It influences depth of color for red based and bay based horses, acting similarly to but not quite the same as Sooty.

DP is incompletely dominant and dominant/recessive, meaning it shows whether it’s Hom or het. Hom will be darker than het, just like Hom sooty is darker than het sooty.

For a horse to be liver chestnut or chocolate palomino, it must have at least 3 out of 4 darkening alleles (so there are 2 slots for sooty and 2 hidden ones for DP). A liver horse with 3 darkening genes (whether it’s 2 DP and 1 Sooty or 1 DP and 2 Sooty) will look something like this:

Friday Dreams 2

One with all 4 darkening genes will still be called “liver” but will look almost black like this:

Thirteen Thrills

See, Rockin, I actually happened to be wrong in my comment. Let me fix it so I let people know I'm wrong.

There is a post somewhere which explains it better with pictures, but basically if a horse is liver it has DP. To be called liver it needs at least 3 "darkening" genes. Both Sooty (sty and S+) and DP are darkening genes. So if a horse has one sty gene and is either liver or chocolate palomino then you know they have have two DP genes and thus homozygous for DP. If they had two sty genes and were liver then they could be either heterozygous or homozygous for DP. The homozygous are usually pretty dark though so easy enough to pick. Otherwise you know by parentage (say if the sire was a Freaky Friday or Cherry Drop which are homozygous for DP)
The bay based horses do show DP as well, but much harder to pick accurately than in the chestnuts

Edit: and they call chimed in while I was thinking and typing about it LOL so this post is a bit redundant now!

What about this guy? Does he carry dp? I changed his cream to pearl, and his name changed and now had liver in it.

I can't really tell, (thanks pearl and kitsb1!) but i think he is Het dp.


01 Hide My Wallet mod

ahhh, thank you fallen. i suspected that he was at least het, but i didnt know for sure.