Skip to content
ShareYourPets

American paint horse

The American Paint Horse is a stock horse with pinto colouring — large patches of white with any other colour — registered on both bloodline and pattern.

To be registered it must trace to American Paint, Quarter Horse or Thoroughbred parents, so it is a breed rather than simply a colour.

It stands 14.2 to 16 hands and is built like the Quarter Horse it shares ancestry with: muscular, compact and quick over short distances. The coat patterns are named and genetically distinct — tobiano, overo, tovero and splashed white — and the distinction matters for more than description, because one of them carries a lethal gene.

Origin
United States, from stock horse and pinto lines
Height
14.2–16 hands
Lifespan
25–30 years
Build
Stock type — muscular and compact
Coat
Tobiano, overo, tovero and splashed white patterns
Health
Overo lethal white syndrome, plus the Quarter Horse five-panel

Related: American cream draft · American quarter horse · American saddlebred · American warmblood

3 american paint horse photos, newest first

  • Willow, a american paint horse

    Willow

    Willow crosses the shallow end at a trot every evening, mostly for the splash.

    FrostyOtter · 6 days ago

  • Echo, a american paint horse

    Echo

    Echo has uncovered a spoon the size of her own head and is treating the site with proper archaeological care.

    FrostyOtter · 1 week ago

  • Echo, a american paint horse

    Echo

    Echo was told to stay. Echo negotiated.

    GentleFinch · 2 weeks ago

Living with a american paint horse

Test for overo lethal white syndrome before breeding two frame overo horses. A foal that inherits the frame gene from both parents is born white, appears healthy, and dies within days of an incurable intestinal obstruction because the nerves of the colon never formed. A single copy causes no harm at all. The DNA test is cheap and definitive, and this is the single most important fact about breeding Paints.

The Quarter Horse five-panel conditions — HYPP, PSSM1, GBED, HERDA, MH — apply here too through shared bloodlines.

Pink skin under white markings sunburns, particularly on the muzzle. Sunblock or a fly mask with a nose piece in summer.

They are easy keepers prone to weight gain and laminitis on rich grass.

White hooves are not weaker than dark ones, despite the persistent stable-yard belief.

General guidance, not veterinary advice. Individual horses vary, and anything about a specific animal is a question for a vet who has seen it.

Worth reading alongside this

More horses by breed

Every horse breed somebody has posted a photo of.