Can the hive mind help me ID this rabbit's color?

[azurbanclucker]

This is Dr. Colosso. We were told he's a Netherland Dwarf. He's about 1 1/2 years old and is a great little guy. What I'm trying to figure out is whether he's broken black or charlie black, not sure which side he'd fall on...

P.S. His mouth got torn up by a rex the previous owner had in a fight. Looks weird but he's not inhibited by it at all.

Thanks in advance!

 

[sourland]

@Bunnylady , should be able to help.

 

[Bunnylady]

Dr. Colloso is a broken Silver Marten. He has the eye circles and ear lacing of the tan pattern, but I'm not seeing any yellow/tan shading there. Without a good, dense black to compare to, it's hard to spot, but his body color just doesn't look like the black of an Otter (plus, if he was an Otter, he'd have a tan-colored triangle behind his ears, and you most likely would have mentioned that).

Most of the broken Dwarfs that I have seen are a bit short on color. With the broken pattern, the broken gene (En) sets the pattern, but there are a lot of modifiers that determine what the pattern looks like. The Dwarf Hotot was developed from the Netherland Dwarf, and I suspect a lot of the broken Dwarfs have some Hotot not so far back in their ancestry. The modifiers of the Dwarf Hotot reduce the color to just rings around the eyes; if a rabbit has just some of these modifiers, it makes sense that there wouldn't be a lot of color on other parts of the body. By definition, a Charlie is a rabbit that has two copies of the broken gene. By just about any breed's standards, your little guy has too much color to be a Charlie (which is good news for him, since Charlies almost always have the health problems that come from having two copies of the broken gene).

 

[azurbanclucker]

Thanks so much for the thorough explanation @Bunnylady ! I'm still a n00b and trying to learn the markers and patterns, so this helps a ton.