The Buckskin Horse is a horse with a body of yellow, cream, tan or a golden color and points which are dark. Genetically, this is a brown or bay colored horse with one gene that is cream. The Buckskin is created by the same dilution that forms a palomino. However, the palomino is formed using a cream on a chestnut base while the buckskin is formed using a cream on a bay base.
When a single cream gene is used, it will dilute a red pigment, but not a black one. This creates a horse with a tan body and points which are black. The color of the body can range from an almost red or deep chocolate body to a pale cream color that is almost white. In fact, some Buckskin horses may even be mistaken for a bay horse.
The Buckskin horse is also often confused with a Dun horse. This is because the dilution is almost identical to the dilute of a Dun horse. However, the Dun has a dorsal stripe that will help to distinguish it from a Buckskin horse. On occasion, the Buckskin will have a tail or mane that appears to have a frost color added to the ends. This is where the hairs that are on the outer side are diluted in the same way the color of the body is diluted. This appears to be similar to the frost coloring that occurs in the Dun horses, but the two different colors are in fact caused by genes that are different from one another.
The Buckskin horse is heterozygous which means that they possess one cream gene instead of two. This means that they will not breed true. If a Buckskin horse is bred with another Buckskin horse, you will not always get a foal that is Buckskin in color. In fact, there is a 50% chance that you will get another color instead of Buckskin. Only when the foal inherits a dilution gene from the mare and the stallion that is a single dilute, will the foal be Buckskin. The resulting foal would be buckskin, smoky black or palomino in color. There is a 25% chance that the foal will be a base color if two Buckskins are bred together. The resulting foal would be bay, chestnut, brown or black in color. There is also a 25% chance that the foal could become double dilute in coloration. This will result in a foal which is perlino, cremello or smoky cream in color. Genetically, the makeup of a horse that is a Buckskin is E? A? Crcr. The ?'S in this formulation is representative of either the recessive or dominant genes that are present in the horse. Which gene will be present depends entirely on the different horse. It can either be A or a in the case of the recessive genes. Or it will be E or e in the case of the dominant genes. In either case, the resulting horse will be considered a Buckskin horse.
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