Delighted!

Several of you might recall that I am a riding instructor (though less often now with my recent job change). At the barn that I teach, I also do some of the classroom lectures including horse coat colors. There are two girls (actually, I suppose women now that they are in their 20s :D ) that I taught as youngsters who are now instructors themselves. Until recently, they were always uninterested in colors and would call the ponies whatever random terms they had picked up over the years, correct or not such as calling the silver black or flaxen chestnut a palomino. Just this summer, the girls starting paying attention to the lessons I gave and actually asked questions. Tonight I went by the barn to visit just as they were getting a couple horses tacked up for a training. One of the girls asked me to clarify if one of the horses was a black or a seal brown, which surprised me. And then the other bowled me over completely by talking about a horse she had seen in a sale ad on craigslist. She said that it was a QH so they had the ubiquitous rear shot, which she said was totally useless for her to judge conformation, but she could clearly see it's rabicano markings...my jaw about hit the floor. The first girl then began commenting about how another ad had listed a horse as being three different colors that are mutually exclusive (like the ad said the horse is a bay chestnut palomino) and the other girl joined in to laugh over the impossibilities. And then the second girl went on to talk about [i]another[/i] ad that the pony was misidentified as a silver black when it was actually silver bay. I could only stand there blinking in shock. These are girls that I had to plead with to at least learn the absolute basics of color (not even the genetics) so that they could tell the riding students the correct colors of the ponies in the barn. And now they are throwing around the color terms like it is old hat...and they can identify white patterns. I had to restrain myself from doing a happy dance in the middle of the barn!