Thanks so much for posting this! I've been meaning to post something about the Argente St Huberts I'm working on, too! They were originally going to be step toward making Creme D'Argentes with better type, but I like them so much I think I'm going to stick with the St Huberts!
There is also one kit that was born yesterday to a red satin dam and a creme d'argent buck. Looks to be fawn/orange. I don't have pictures yet.
I'd love to see pictures of the red Satin x Creme bunny when you get some. You can be fairly sure that it's an orange; both the red Satin and the Creme are orange genetically <
A_??C_D_ee>. The bunny should not be a fawn (by this I mean dilute orange) unless there were ancestors with dilute color in their both of their backgrounds, and they both carry <
d>.
I don't think they fit St. Huberts COD because they have a white tail and some white underbelly markings as well. They also carry Otter genetics which isn't good.
I agree that carrying otter isn't ideal for St Huberts, but the belly and tail color look fine to me. The Argente St Hubert working standard calls for
surface color on the belly and underside of the tail to be "creamy white," so I think your bunnies are okay in that regard. They're basically supposed to be chestnuts (or an agouti of another base color ), which usually have a white undertail. The DQ is for white
undercolor on the belly.
Here's a link to the working standard:
https://arba.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ArgentStHubert.pdf
Below are some photos of our St Huberts that caused some excitement a show recently, and got great comments from the judges. They're just 10 weeks old, so the silvering is still developing on their faces, but they're coming along beautifully. They're out of a purebred Champagne doe x purebred NZ red buck. I used a Champagne that is too heavily silvered for the ARBA standard in hopes that the bunnies, who would get only one copy of <
si>, would silver enough to look good. Happily, that seems to be what's happening. You can see that the surface color on belly and under the tail are white, but the belly undercolor is slate, like a chestnut should be:
The first four photos are of the doe, who has the better silvering in my opinion. She looks a bit flat in this photo, but is not really - we're still working on posing training.
The last two are of the buck, who has lighter silvering, but better type, as the doe is just slightly hollow over her loin at the moment. According to the working standard, the amount of silvering is not as important as the evenness of silvering, and I'm happy with this first generation in that regard. The ring color is worth twice as many points (10) as the silvering (5), so I am also pleased with the nice agouti banding in these bunnies. Because I used a red, eventually I probably am going to start seeing wideband effects on the width of the middle ring as I interbreed these down the road, which will not be ideal... but it's a work in progress.
Here are some photos of the chestnuts at 8weeks. The one in the center seems to have two copies of Si3, or some other subtle color difference.
Unless your chocolate otter buck has argente in his background, your doe bunny couldn't get two copies of <
si>; she'd get one from her dam, but the buck shouldn't have one to give. I'd suspect that she inherited some modifiers that the buck bunnies didn't get.
Having raised purebred Champagnes for a couple of years, I can tell you that there can be a lot variation in the amount of silvering across individuals even from the same litter. (I'm actually finding that there is a lot of variation in nearly
all traits in these Champagnes - it's very different from my Satins, which I've been breeding for so long that they're really consistent, and I know what to expect from each matrilineal line.) But the <
si> in my Champagnes is definitely dominant, as every kit from both my Satin x Champagne crosses, and this NZR x Champagne cross, has been silvered. Here's one of the Champagne x black Satin crosses; in this photo he is 12 weeks, so he's even more silvered now:
The thing I notice about all of these half-argentes is that the silvering tends to be a bit lighter on the face and ears, some of which is a fault. (You can see in the photo above what I mean.) In Champagnes, the head, ears and feet are to be exactly the same color as the body (except the nose butterfly), but the Argente St Hubert standard is confusing about the coloring of ears and feet. In the Color section it says, "
Head, ears and legs are to match body color as close as possible," while in the Surface Color subsection it says, "
There should be an even amount of frosting or silvering on the body, with a slightly darker muzzle, ears and feet.)
Anyway, thanks for the post and I'd love to see how your bunnies develop!
