That has always startled me when tanning pelts, the skin colorur patterns do not match the fur colour. No idea if this has anything to do with the coat colour type, or if it's something completly different.
That's really interesting. In my experience, our rabbits' skin color has always matched coat color, though I admit that I have never tanned hides without fur so I may have missed it. I know our goats have colored spots on their skin that are concealed by completely white fur, but I've never seen anything like that in our rabbits. I'd love to hear more about the specific differences you've seen.
Is there a correlation between skin color and coat color? I've recently done some culling and butchering and observed that some of my blue rabbits had a mottled skin color. I didn't take pictures unfortunately but I'm referring to skin that, if it were a coat of fur, would appear to be a "broken". Is this a sign that what I thought were selfs were steels? I did suspect that.
My steels never looked any different other than having the banding pattern on the hairs pushed up toward the top of the hair shaft, and the self steels didn't look different at all. There was no difference even as newborn kits, except that what appeared to be selfs had faint nape triangles in the steel kits; their bodies were indistinguishable from selfs. In fact even my otter's, martens' and agoutis' bodies are indistinguishable from selfs as newborns - only their markings set them apart on Day 1, before the fur starts getting longer.
The only thing I can think of might be a blue sable or especially a blue seal; those are shaded varieties, and in the diluted form the shading can be pretty subtle. They may appear to be blues, but their skin might reflect the shading (I've never looked for that). Were your growouts' skin patterns spotted, like the pattern on the rabbit at the top left of this post, or was it more like a blanket with the extremities trending different?
What colors are you used to seeing in your rabbits? Any sables in the line?
If you could find a photo of a broken rabbit that had the pattern you saw on your growouts (somewhere on the internet, maybe?), that might be helpful.
