The Camarillo White Horse is a rare horse breed less than 100 years old known for its pure white color. It dates back to 1921, when Adolfo Camarillo, one of the last Californios, purchased a 9-year-old stallion named Sultan at the California State Fair in Sacramento.[1] The California White horse was owned and bred by the Camarillo family until the death of Adolfo Camarillo’s daughter Carmen in 1987.[2]
The Camarillo White Horse is known for its pure white color, which includes pink skin under the white hair coat. Unlike a gray horse that is born dark and lightens as it gets older, Camarillo White horses are white from birth and remain white throughout their lives.
The breed is not only a color breed. It has other distinctive physical characteristics, including a compact and refined build. They are known to have strong limbs, an expressive face, large eyes, well-defined withers, laid back shoulders and a well-arched neck.[citation needed]
True white is often considered a very difficult and rare color to achieve. Formerly, it was said that statistically there is only a 50% chance of producing living white offspring from any given mating, regardless of the color of the other parent. However, this is only true of those horses carrying the overo or frame overo allele, resulting in lethal white syndrome. Actual white dominant genes are rarely lethal when homozygous. When two overo-carrying horses are bred to one another, there is a 50% chance of producing a living white horse (Ww), a 25% chance of producing a non-white horse (ww), but also a 25% chance of producing a foal that dies within a few days.[3][4]
Because there are different genetics involved, Camarillo White horses do not carry the overo genes for lethal white syndrome, but get their color from W4 on the KIT locus.[5]
