Is this a chestnut
- Thread starter Maplegrove Rabbitry
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Those don't look like chestnuts to me. They don't have the black ear lacing or ticking that should normally be showing up at this age (and they would have most likely been born looking black with light inner ear and bellies if they were chestnut). Those look like non-extension colors, which in this case would be red, orange and/or fawn. The darker shades along the nose and flanks of the darkest one, on the right, and possibly the one in the middle, would be what's called "smut" on an orange/red. It's the dark coloration that is frequently left over by the non-extension alleles, usually found in the same places you'd typically see it on a tort, which is a non-extension self.
The sire is a chestnut agouti - you can see the black lacing on his ears and throughout his fur. If you blow into the fur, you'll see what's known as "ring color," bands of slate gray-orange-dark ticking appearing on each hair. Here are some examples; the first is a chestnut Polish, the second is a chestnut St Hubert, so in that photo, in addition to the chestnut bands, white hairs interspersed throughout, called "silvering."
The two kits on either end of the photo below are what would normally be called chestnut, with the middle one being chinchilla:
Agouti is technically a pattern, not a color, which is produced by an allele on the A locus notated <A>. It results in rings on the fur, and what I always call "trim," which is white on the belly, undertail, inner legs, and around the nostrils, eyes, jawline and inner ears.
Agoutis come in different base colors (black; its dilute, blue; chocolate; and its dilute, lilac), so other names are added to the moniker "agouti," or substituted entirely for it. Thus a black agouti is called chestnut agouti or just chestnut, blue agouti is called opal, a chocolate agouti is called that or amber (in Rex), and lilac agouti is known as lynx.
There other alleles that affect the expression of the agouti varieties. A dominant chinchilla allele <c(chd)_> prevents most or all expression of yellow pigments, so where a normal agouti is orange, it will be pearly white. A black chinchilla agouti is called "chinchilla" and a blue chinchilla agouti is called blue chinchilla, or squirrel.
Non-extension alleles <ee> prevent the expression of the dark banding, leaving only the orange parts. So a red, orange, fawn, cream, will have little or no dark ticking but will still show the agouti "trim." The non-extension alleles do leave a bit of dark ticking on the shorter fur (face, ears, flanks, belly, feet and tail), which is called "smut." How much smut depends on other genes like one called wideband <w> and others called modifiers. In these varieties, you will not see the typical ring pattern in the body fur, which is why in some breeds they are classed in the "Wideband Group" rather than as an agouti; but they are, genetically, still agoutis.
If you put the chinchilla and the non-extension alleles together on an agouti, you get suppression of both orange colors and dark ticking, leaving an all-white or nearly all-white rabbit with dark eyes, called an "ermine" or a "frosty." The rabbit may still have the smut of a non-extension variety showing, or as it's called, a "veil" or "haze" of black tipping. One of the newest ARBA-accepted breeds, the Czech Frosty, is this variety.
Photo of Czech Frosty from https://arba.net/czech-frosty/
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