Question about New Zealand Rabbit colors

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Some people get a little confused about this; Castor and Chestnut are not quite the same thing. They share the same major color genes, yes, but there are some little helper genes called rufus modifiers present in the Castor that are lacking in the Chestnut. The rufus modifiers increase the amount of red/yellow pigment in the coat. In some breeds, like the Mini Rex, a Red is genetically pretty much the same thing as an Orange, it just has several rufus modifiers cranking up the color to a deep red. A New Zealand Red has the wide band gene to put the color on the belly, too, but it needs the rufus modifiers to achieve that deep red. Likewise, most rabbit breeds have Chestnut as a color, but in the Rex breeds, the showable version (Castor) has a deeper, richer color because of the presence of the rufus modifiers. Castor, with the rufus coloring, is the correct color for a Rex, Chestnut, without the rufus, is not; some judges would simply fault a Rex with the lighter color as having 'poor color,' and some would disqualify it as being a non-showable color (Chestnut) rather than the showable one (Castor).

Your rabbit with the mane looks a bit redder than your basic Chestnut; even the eye circles appear to have a reddish tinge. What color is its belly?

Porter has a red belly just like the rest of him.

marion sage said:

Porter has a red belly just like the rest of him.

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Oho!

This color gets more interesting by the minute. Apparently, Porter is a Wide-Band Chestnut with a lot of rufus (A_B_C_D_E_ww++++).

If you think about the typical wild-type Agouti patterned rabbit (Chestnut), the body hairs have a black tip, then a band of a lighter, yellowish color, then a blue-gray color down next to the skin. The Wide band (w) works a lot like non-extension (e) in that they both make the yellowish band of color in the typical Agouti much wider, pushing the black back to the very tip. Put both non-extension and wide band in the same rabbit, and you push the black completely off the hair, and what you are left with is just the yellow/red pigment. Wide band also allows the red pigment to show up on the belly, so add some rufus and voila, you have a completely red rabbit.

By itself, wide band isn't quite as effective as non-extension at pushing the black off the hair; it leaves a bit more on the tip than non-extension does. That's why Porter looks kinda like a super-smutty Red. A sooty or smutty Red would have non-extension, but not wide band, so it would have some black ticking on the coat and a white belly. Porter is like "close, but no cigar," only the lack of the non-extension gene prevents him from being a decent Red by New Zealand terms.

As to what name to put on it, the nearest I can come would be a color in the Satin breed's palette - Copper.

Yes, the gray one IS a Chinchilla Variety. NO it is not a recognized Variety, but that doesn’t mean that your bunny is not purebred. My chinchilla New Zealand Doe was bred from show quality New Zealand’s and her mom won grand champion at our county fair a few years ago. Just because a variety is not recognized does not mean that the rabbit doesn’t come in said Variety.

ffa.okie.4h said:

Yes, the gray one IS a Chinchilla Variety. NO it is not a recognized Variety, but that doesn’t mean that your bunny is not purebred. My chinchilla New Zealand Doe was bred from show quality New Zealand’s and her mom won grand champion at our county fair a few years ago. Just because a variety is not recognized does not mean that the rabbit doesn’t come in said Variety.

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If, instead of a Chin, you had a pink-eyed rabbit with a white body and black on the ears, nose, feet and tail, would you call that a New Zealand, too?

Pedigrees are not required to enter a rabbit in a show. As long as rabbit looks enough like one specific breed (correct coat, color, etc), you theoretically could enter a 'Heinz 57' in a class - and possibly even win! Outcrosses are done all the time, for various reasons. Most of the time, it is to improve some feature (type, coat density, etc). None of the recognized colors of the NZ should produce Chinchilla; the only way that color could happen is an outcross to one of the Chin breeds. Since almost every trait of the NZ (type, coat density, etc), are already at a very high level, an outcross would likely lose some ground rather than gain it. Certainly, introducing Chinchilla genes would mess up most of the colors of the NZ, resulting in a large percentage of unshowable or 'poorly colored" offspring. My guess is someone was trying to improve their Chins by outcrossing to the NZ, and then someone else bred those Chin/NZ mixes (hybrid vigor, and all that) back to NZ's, and a few generations later, the result of that cross is still showing up. Sometimes people amuse themselves by doing crosses just to play with color, but they can create headaches and confusion that lasts for generations.

Once you introduce genes like that, they can lurk in the pool for a very, very long time. I had a line of Harlequins that occasionally threw REW's, the result of an outcross to a NZ 6 or more generations back. Yes, technically, they were "purebred" Harlequins (their siblings were even pedigreed, since their parents had nothing but Harlequin colors for several generations behind them), but I couldn't very well call a pure white rabbit with pink eyes a Harlequin, could I? I also had some Holland Lops that threw an angora coated baby every so often. Hollands don't come with long hair, so they couldn't be Hollands, nor could they be Fuzzy Lops with only Hollands on their pedigrees. To avoid confusion and maintain my credibility, I called the longhairs Holland/Fuzzy Lop crosses (or just "whoopses"). I wasn't doing the cross, but clearly, someone had, and it was simpler and more truthful to represent them that way.