Talk:Asinara donkey

Albino dubious

Not going to go tagging this article or start a bunch of drama, but albino does not exist in horses and I doubt that it exists in donkeys for the same general set of reasons -- see white (horse) and, more to the point Dominant white. I am not up on how donkey coat color genetics compare to horse coat color genetics, but giving you a heads up that if they are similar, then they can't be "albino." Even if someone has a theory they are "albino," absent a DNA study, I really doubt it: True albinism doesn't occur in the horse at all, save possibly in lethal white syndrome and even then, it's still apparently not albinism in the technical sense (read the albinism article for details). I've heard some people make an argument for leucism causing white animals, though that is not what is going on in horses, either (the white horse article is the simple overview, dominant white and other articles go into the genetic detail). All that said, people used to call white horses "albino" before they understood the genetics, and perhaps Italian has the same popular use of "albino" in the sloppy, non-scintific sense of "a white animal." These donkeys appear to be blue-eyed (?) with pink, unpigmented skin, which leads me to suspect that they probably carry something akin to either sabino white, dominant white or maybe -to get the blue eyes - the splash white genes. If grays are "heterozygous," are some of them NOT born white? (if so, that really makes me suspect dominant white). Anyway, giving you a heads up, given that it looks like there is no URL to the scientific study cited and it's in Italian, which I can't read anyway. Montanabw^(talk) 22:38, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Well you'd need a geneticist to answer that, and I'm not one. I just put in what is in the source (and actually in a lot of other sources too). They display all the typical albino characteristics (pink skin, white hair, colourless eyes and overall weakness - the gaits are described as "incerti", hesitant or uncertain); the non-white donkeys of the same population are much stronger. That's all I know. It doesn't greatly matter, but I left heterozygous carrier as a redlink on purpose; it's a very common term, and should have some coverage here. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 23:16, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

No, we need a peer reviewed study by a geneticist, presumably you and I can read (and I still can email Countercanter, who IS a geneticist) But it's redundant and imprecise to say "heterozygous carrier." To be heterozygous, that means (as you undoubtably know) that the animal "carries" only one copy of a given allele, and thus, if it is a recessive gene, it only "carries" the trait expressed by that allele, though if it is a dominant gene, (as is the dominant white gene) then they do express the trait to some extent. So really, if the white color is expressed in a hetetozygous fashion, then they "express" it rather than just "carry" it (though, to be technical, they both carry and express the trait). Also, this is not true albinism, their eyes are not truly "colorless" if they are blue, there is some pigmentation (see equine eye for details on blue eyes). The pink skin alone doesn't make an animal albino, dominant white and sabino white horses also have unpigmented pink skin. As for white being a problem, are they "proven" to be weaker overall, (your article says nothing about this) or just perhaps less-selectively bred animals with conformation defects and prone to sun sensiitivity? (We tell jokes about people who breed horses only for color in the USA, and in doing so produce inferior animals, one wag dubbed them "hideozygous" LOL ) One reason I ask all this is because Europe sometimes lags behind the US in studying equine coat color genetics; for example, some registries in the UK still are in denial about the buckskin and dun colors being created from totally separate genes (had a chat with Pesky Commoner about this), and even in the USA The Jockey Club still insists on registering Thoroughbreds as "gray or roan" even though (according to leading geneticists like Sponenberg, at least) true roan does not appear to exist in the Thoroughbred. We also still have a lot of uninformed people calling gray horses "white" and white horses "albino." I know your general devotion to specificity and accuracy, and the "albino" thing is almost certainly imprecise at best. Curious if the sources saying "albino" cite to peer-reviewed scientific studies and if so, be curious to see links (even if in Italian) The one that was linked (in Italian) looked like a government fact sheet of some sort? Montanabw^(talk) 19:41, 16 September 2013 (UTC)