Color Quandry

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This child started out a pale red....almost as pale red as a Slybaby even though he is not one. I knew he would darken up to a cherry red, although I admit I have not been paying attention to it very much. I have been focusing on the other two to see if their Cat stripes show up. They have not by the way, but Bambi seems to be thinking about it--her belly is silver.

But what is happening there on his face? WTF? I thought his blaze was shedding. It is not. Those white hairs are firmly attached to his head. And he would prefer I quit yanking on them, thanks.

Now this I cannot ignore. That is just some roan on his neck, right there. And it is not just a patch of roan--it is everywhere he has shed off so far. His neck is the most obvious, but his hip has it too

And his shoulders. Note how funny his lower legs look--they just are not shed off yet. They look like buckskin body color right now--but they are just baby fuzz still

In a distant shot, you have to know what you are looking for to see it. Especially when you take the pics at 8:30 pm. I am a busy girl people--plus it was about 100 today. Ugh
I just cannot come up with another answer though--this neck is just roan. You can even see where the long baby hairs still are, and the difference in color.

Now someone explain this to me. Mama is brown (although bleached to an ugly bay right now). Her daddy is dun (High Brow Hickory), and her mother was as close to black as you can get--her daddy was Peponita and she looked like him. Daddy is red. Solid red, but with pretty much those same white markings that are pretty prominent in his babies--the big wide blaze, the socks..... Now his daddy is a roan (Peptoboonsmal), and his mama was red but with a lot of roaning (but not really a roan).

There is no genetic way for this colt to be a roan. It just cannot happen. I know enough about genetics to know that much. So what we have here is a quandry. The stud manager is sure all is well (but obviously to confirm via DNA and if there was an error, we will just fix it), and I totally trust him, but it is possible there was an error in semen. She was bred one time for this baby, via shipped semen, and there are no roan colts on my property, so there could not have been an accident. Obviously, we will know when we DNA, but I cannot do that til I register him, and I cannot do that til he is shed all the way off so I know what or who in the hell he is.

Is it possible that this is just rabicano? Does that pass without a parent showing it? That I do not know. Pepto Taz has a little frostiness in his flanks, but not like this---

What in the world is going on here?

It is not a tragedy one way or the other, and he sure is handsome either way---but an interesting turn of events, isn't it?