C...chd...chm...chl...ch...c

Spending the day with Angora Rabbit texts, I have decided to try and combine everything I have read about this "color amount" of rabbit genetics into usable format.

From what I can gather, rabbits are born with 4 units of BLACK pigment, and 3 units of YELLOW. These pigments will be allowed expression as per the "c" genes they inherit alongside.

C allows all color to be fully expressed. The bunny will have a black pupil and brown eyes. Fur will be as dark as it can be.
chd will allow all BLACK but only 1 YELLOW, and bunny will have a black pupil and mottled blue gray or gray eyes. Fur will be as dark as it can be.
chm will allow 3 BLACK but NO YELLOW, and bunny will have a reddish glowing pupil and light brown eyes. Fur will be a TAD lighter than it can be.
chl will allow 2 BLACK but NO YELLOW, and bunny will have (strangely enough) a reddish glowing pupil and brown eyes. Fur will definitely be lighter all over and "shaded" on the body.
ch will allow only 2 units of BLACK to be expressed, and these stay on the POINTS of the rabbit (ears, feet, tail), and bunny will have a red pupil and red eyes. These points will be darker when the air is cold! Fur will be void of color or white.
c allows NO color to be expressed anywhere, and bunny will have a red pupil and red eyes and white fur.

Right now in my barns I have all colors of the above eyes. Neat. I have been stymied by chd/chm/chl. It is confusing, for they work together and can tweak the color expression to the point that you have NO IDEA what is doing what. I don't do enough breeding in quick succession to clearly see all possibilities, so I rely on seeing adult rabbits elsewhere and the color names that are given to them.

This is not always enough help, for many breeders have no idea how it all works and giving color names is just a good guess half the time!

DARTH...BEFORE
Here is the newest stud to grace Countrywool's Bunny Barns. Darth is in line for a shearing, and I'll post a true BARE HARE picture of him tomorrow. At 4 1/2 months, he is just about ready to embark on his new career. He's kind of young, but I am seeing signs he would welcome a doe....he seems more interested in what I smell like after I feed the girls than the food I am bringing him! This means his nose is working JUST fine...we'll see how all the other parts work the first week of October.

You'll notice the "brown" tinges to his fur...almost a halo. In the right light, he has a brown "undercoat" on his face. I have no idea what genetics are causing this and I am CONSUMED with curiosity. I will hit the books this week to see what I can drum up.

I suspect his color may be a sorta "self chin", (seal?) as his eyes are gray, but this will only be proven after I have bred him to a few does and see what color bunnies he produces. A true seal is "chdchd" and he cannot be that.

"sorta" self chin genetics: aa B- chdc D- E-

Could this brown aura and the brown facial hair be some background "steel" genetics popping out (steel on his mom's side WAY back)?

His Dad, who is a full German Angora, and therefore white as snow, can only contribute a "c" to the color mix, so his mom was the "chd" contributor. She was black (or so she looked when I saw her), but this fellow is definitely not black!

NEO ...ON THE MOVE

Neo just spent his first two nights in the bachelor barn. His mom needed the emotional space, and Neo was ready to go. He is roomed between his dad HANS OLO and RINGO, who has been here for 7 years and the most contented bachelor bunny I have ever had.

Here he is at 7 weeks:

NEW BUNNY PLANS

Little Neo is not so little anymore, and his mom is quite...er..."ready" to have another. Hopefully this time she will have a litter (plural) of new ones. She and Neo's DAD had a romp last week, and if all goes well (and it hasn't much this summer) there will be a new nest of bunnies the second week of October. We'll see.

Breeding rabbits can become a light (not enough) or heat(too much) issue as does need plenty of light to ovulate, and bucks need cool temps to keep that sperm bank humming. So spring and fall are peak times to breed outside rabbits here in NY. This past spring I did not have rabbits the right age/unrelation to breed together, and so it was a dry spring in the barns. Only Glinda has been producing families this year. I have missed baby bunnies!

This summer I purchased DARTH from Helen Thelen at Bay Colony Farm. I went looking for the blackest genetics I could find and he popped up, so home he came. He is part of big plans for the fall. He gets sheared this week in anticipation of his rendezvous planned for the first week of October. Pictures of he and Neowill be posted tomorrow if it doesn't rain and I get some good snaps.

NEO AT 5 WEEKS

This little trooper looks just fine 1 hour after botfly surgery. He sat still so I could yet again flush out the wound with peroxide, and then went to romp around the grooming table so I could take his picture. Such a sweetheart!

His eyes go from light brown to grey and now they look mottled. I have decided he cannot be a lilac tortoiseshell as his gold color is too deep, so I am leaning to chocolate tortoiseshell with the admonition that he may have the chl or chd genes playing games with his color expression.

BOT FLIES AND BUNNIES

Poor Neo was the victim of a random botfly attack this week. 5 weeks old and cute as a button, the humidity and heat didn't affect him EXCEPT that a lone fly found a way to interfere with his shiny existence.

Raising bunnies is fraught with odd moments of animal husbandry. There are conditions that are not life threatening if one gets to them quick enough. One of the most common, and distasteful, things one sees in summer, is fly strike, where a fly lays many eggs on or in the damp/soiled areas of a rabbit's fur/skin. This can kill the rabbit within a day or two as the maggots eat their way into the skin and blood stream. Hot and humid weather sees this condition proliferate. Warbles is another.

"Warbles is the name of the parasitic condition resulting from the implantation of the botfy (Cuterebra sp.) larva under the skin..." Completely Angora, Kilfoyle and Samson, 2nd edition, page 93. I had seen warbles in kittens 20 year ago, but the vet took care of them and they returned home happy and healthy. This time I thought we would try to handle things ourselves.

Following procedure in Completely Angora, I found the head of the worm and coaxed it out of hiding. At the ready with bent needle nose pliers, I got a good hold of the creature and pulled. It slid out easily and Neo was not all that upset. (He was more upset at being held still for the whole thing!). I flushed the huge gaping hole with peroxide, which I will continue for a week until it heals. I could not get a good picture of the larva, so here is a great web page with a few:
Botflies

Glinda as a Wee One

Kim of Nordic Angoras sent me this cute picture of Glinda when she was a wee bunny. Glinda is a tortoiseshell color:
aaB-C-D-ee
PLUS she has a healthy dose of rufus coloring. Rufus is one of those MODIFYING genes that runs through rabbit lines and seems to be unconnected to any particular color. BUT it will only express itself when there is a lack of black pigment in the coat. So, it rides along blindly in some rabbit families until it reaches the "torte" and "fawn" colors, where it makes the golden tones deeper, more orange or redder.
Now Glinda is mother to BELINDA and also to NEO. These guys, if you will remember, were born about 3 months apart. Belinda expresses rufus in her coat, but Neo does not.

Neo: the Wee Fellow

He's growing like a weed. While most 3 week old bunnies are just leaving the nest, he has been racing around the cage with (AND... over, under and around) his mom for a full week now. He LOVES to eat hay! He ate through all the hay in his nest area one day last week, so now I give him his own handful twice a day PLUS he gets a bowl of whole oats to nibble on PLUS he is invading his mother's food dish on a regular basis. All this while nursing when he can (he does pester his mother a lot...she avoids him on occasion.) Here he is at age 24 days:

RINGS IN COATS

In the angora coat world, color is displayed in an uneven manner. When you look at a rabbit in full coat, you see the outermost tips and that is what the rabbit appears to be. But, lo and behold, when you part the fiber...other colors and shades of color emerge.

In self rabbits, it is desirable to have the color be as even as possible down the fiber shaft, but I have seen very few that can boast of this. One rabbit, way back in my past, had deep color down to the roots, and he was an English angora buck named Fabio. In my fantasy life, I dream of breeding an entire herd of angoras that matches his color depth. Time will tell (Hey, we all need goals,right?!?)

Here is BELINDA (reddish) and DARTH (grayish). Both are about 3 months old and you will notice the many RINGS in their coats. One set of lighter/darker colors are their baby coats which tend to stripe, but then the adult version is growing in right behind it.

COLOR GENETICS IN RABBITS

I love color expression in angoras. I always want to know what genes are doing what, and I sporadically apply myself to learning more. I have recently seen blacks in my barn that are not dark, and have been wondering what code they might be, and what to NAME them. They do have black faces and brown eyes, but white hairs in their coats and coats that now, aged 2-3 years, are almost white. But more about black rabbits later...

The Wee Fellow is a tortoiseshell (torte) pattern. This a one of the SELF color patterns that rabbits exhibit. There are many variations in tortes! These variations are lighter/darker/redder/whiter/blonder tinged with brown/tinged with smoky charcoal/tinged with soft brown/tinged with silver and then there is a whole group of almost white rabbits that have the torte pattern as a basis for their color! And then there are many MODIFYING genes that float in around color expression that tweak parts of it. So, a rabbit's color is more than the sum of the genetic code in letters. There is a torte color and then an EXCELLENT torte color.

Basic color genetics works like this.....All rabbits have a full range of 2 colors available to them to use in making up their coat/skin/eye/toenail colors: black and yellow (white is the absence of ALL color). The ABCDE code will arrange the color as it wants:

(Capitals are dominant traits in that group)
A Agouti and a self at marten
B Black and b chocolate
C Color and c no color (white) also chl and chd and ch (some color genes)
D Dark and d dilute
E color Extended fully along color shaft and e no Extension of black and also Es (steel) Ej (harlequin)

Each rabbit gets one set of each letter, but can get combos in lower/uppercase.

AABBCCDDEE.

AaBbCcDdEe

aaBBCCDDEE

aabbccddee

(We can make color combinations up all day....)

many times we do not have a clear understanding of a rabbit's genetic code, but by looking at the rabbit, we can assume a lot. When there are hidden possibilities, the unknown is written as a (-), so a black rabbit that is REALLY
aaBBCCDdEe (but we don't know that)can be written aaB-C-D-E-

The dominant genes express themselves no matter what.
Chl, chd and ch work together. (There are other rules here..will add to this list as time goes on.....please add your comments!)

Tortoiseshell patterns all share one thing....they have 2 "ee" genes. What those "ee" genes do is keep the color BLACK from "extending" itself past the extremities of the rabbit (face/feet/tail/haunches/ears). So you get a rabbit with a dark "mask" who's body is a gold (or creme)color of some sort.

Tortoiseshell code is:
aaB-C-D-ee (Glinda)

Chocolate Tortoiseshell code:
aabbC-D-ee (Belinda)

Lilac Tortoiseshell code:
aabbC-ddee (Wee Fellow.....now named NEO!)

Blue Tortoiseshell code
aaB-Cddee

This gets complicated, but just keep at it.