Blue eyes in hotot the work of Vienna?

[Deutschebunny]

I wonder if anyone can clarify this.
I breed hotots and one big issue is blue spots in the iris or the most extreme case a totally blue iris. In my mind this isn’t the beautiful vivid blue of the Vienna bew. I have been failing in my attempt to persuade a breeder friend of hotots that have ‘blue’ eyes that this is a fault and not, as they say, a result of the Vienna gene working alongside the du and en hotot genotype. If you breed a blue eye fault with a blue eye fault you’ll end up with more and that such rabbits should not be used or if desperate can be mated to a dark iris animal. In my mind, avoid. I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts. Thank you.

 

[SableSteel]

In hotots its not usually the vienna gene, but the du gene with certain modifiers can lead to blue eyes too. Breeding away from these blue eyes is recommended if you want show quality hotots.

 

[akane]

You cannot have the vienna gene if you are not getting solid white rabbits. While sometimes vienna marked rabbits will have blue eyes with the odd white marking crossing them should get you some true blue eyed white rabbits eventually and usually the blue eye shows up on the full BEW. You can't have a BEW with hotot markings so if they have no solid white BEW then it eventually proves lack of any vienna gene. There should be a 25% chance of full BEW rabbits with every mating of vienna marked rabbits. Lots of genes can make a blue or bluish grey eye. Especially if it's only partially tinted. All dilution genes, chocolate, and the dutch itself occasionally causes it to happen.

Even if it were vienna genes then breeding them together will definitely guarantee you faults as you will not only get more blue eyed rabbits but lack of hotot dark markings with it so you'd definitely want to breed it out even more than the stray tinted eye. It even shows your rabbits are not pure because vienna should not exist in hotots so vienna carrying rabbits would have to be crossed to another breed. No matter what they insist they certainly don't want to breed it if they care about faults and having purebred, properly marked hotots. A little different if someone is creating mutts for pet sales and insists it's the wrong gene but if your argument is simply that it will create faults then it doesn't matter if you win that one because both situations will create not just faults but flat out DQ in the case of vienna genes.