This pretty fellow was offered up in a super limited edition, and sold out within about an hour.  Breyer called him "a beautiful reminder of the summer of 2010," which is as fitting an end to summer as anything!  Sad to think that summer has finally come to an end, but I'm afraid it's true.

Summer Love is a red dun pinto, using the Make A Wish mold which was created by Kathleen Moody in 2009.  According to the Identify Your Breyer website, so far Make A Wish has been used only twice before: as a BreyerFest tent special palomino in 2009 (only 1,350 made), and as a BreyerFest Live Auction special in dapple gray (only 1 made).  

Between those two runs and this exclusive run of only 250 models, Make A Wish is shaping up to be one of Breyer's most exclusive molds so far.  

The excitement for Summer Love kicked off yesterday, when Breyer sent an email to their mailing list subscribers.  The announcement was later posted to their website.  With a price tag of $125, a lot of collectors were deterred right off the bat.

At noon today (10AM Pacific) the phone lines opened at Breyer.  A few forum users at Model Horse BLAB and elsewhere reported dialing and re-dialing repeatedly before they finally reached a sales rep.  (I'm a little surprised that Breyer doesn't have a phone system that allows for queuing, but maybe they feel that would spoil the experience.)  Within an hour at the most, the entire run of Summer Love was sold out.

A red dun pinto is a pretty complicated animal, from a genetic perspective.  The dun gene is a dilution gene, which means that it acts on one of the three basic horse coat colors (black, bay, and chestnut) to make them lighter.  

When most people think of a dun horse, they picture a yellowish grayish, mustard-y sort of color, with dark points (legs, mane, and tail).  This is the bay dun, which is also called "zebra dun."  It often comes with primitive markings - stripes on the legs, and a dorsal stripe.  Genetically, this is the work of the dun gene diluting the bay coat color.

Red dun, as you might already have guessed, is what happens when you apply the dun dilution gene to a chestnut coat color.  They do not have dark points, because dark points are not part of the chestnut color gene.  However, the dun gene will fade the points less than the body color, so the points on a red dun horse may be a darker red (chestnut) color than the rest of the horse.

(For the sake of completion, a grullo horse is what happens when the dun gene dilutes a black horse color.)

Now take that and make it a pinto, for good measure!

I like it when Breyer artists pick complicated yet realistic colors for their models.  Is red dun pinto an expected color for a purebred Arabian?  No it is not.  Sabino is the only spotting pattern which exists in purebred Arabians, and purebred Arabians also do not carry dilution genes like dun.  It simply means that Summer Love is not a purebred Arabian - but perhaps that's just in keeping with his name!