Historical Pony: Gunner's Moon

Today's historical pony is the stallion Gunner's Moon. He was a very dramatic looking sooty buckskin. He's quite a dark buckskin with a lot of black in his coat and often had vivid dappling. Gunner had a dark "mask" on his face which is common in sooty buckskin. I talked about sooty in our previous two historical pony posts and you can learn about it on my website: https://www.thecolorfulchincoteague.com/sooty.html

We don't know the genetics of sooty but Gunner was an example of how it appears to be inherited. Many of his foals seem to have inherited his sooty, both on and off the island. Notably his sooty buckskin daughter Poco Latte PW who then passed it on to many of her foals. Other offspring like Merry Teapot's High Bid didn't have sooty. We'll see what science can uncover one day about the inheritance of sooty. Until then I try to track what families, like this one, seem to have a lot of sooty ponies.

Gunner's Moon was sometimes described as a dun. It came up on the email digest group (yes I'm old) and I was pretty sure he wasn't. So the next time I was at Pony Penning I went looking for him to verify. I checked his legs and his body for striping, nope. I climbed up on the fence to take a look at his back for a dorsal stripe, nope. I took the last picture after I verified he didn't have any primitive markings. He died the next year before I could see him again.

Gunner's Moon also appears to have been half Arabian. He definitely had the look. Read about the long history of Arabian outcrossing here: https://www.thecolorfulchincoteague.com/arabian.html