In the first photo he looks like a sable, in the second he looks like a blue sable, aka smoke pearl. What seems to be pale eye color in the second photo inclines me toward smoke pearl, but the exposures on the two photos are so different that it'll have to be your call as to whether he's chocolatey-sepia, or bluish-gray, in his basic color. What looks like ticking is part of the development of the sable color - they go through some significant changes in their surface color from birth to maturity.
A self rabbit has a genetic code that prevents the wild type banding on the hairs and the resulting "trim" around the ears, eyes, nostrils, jawline, feet, belly and tail. So the rabbit is all one color, top and bottom. Self rabbits are all homozygous on the A locus for the most recessive allele, <
aa>. There are only two other known alleles (options) on that locus, agouti <
A> and tan<
a(t)>, but since self is the most recessive, a self rabbit cannot hide or "carry" either of them. (Self does not mean that the rabbit is a "solid" color - selfs can be marked as broken, silvered, or himalayan, see below).
The first places I look to determine self versus agouti or otter (or its variations tan or marten) is the inner ears and the nostrils, and also the inner portions of the hind feet. If you see any of these you can be pretty sure the rabbit is not a self:
View attachment 43795 View attachment 43797 View attachment 43798
Self does
not mean there is no
shading of that single color. Shading can happen to self rabbits as a result of at least two different alleles on two different places on the genome (called the C locus and the E locus). Those two are sable (the allele that makes sables and smoke pearls) and non-extension (what makes tort and sable point). In these cases, the alleles affect how that single color is laid down along the hairshaft, so it looks different on longer hairs than it does on shorter hairs.
Sable is a self black with <
c(chl)> in the dominant place on the C locus:
View attachment 43799
Tort is a self black with <
ee> on the E locus:
View attachment 43800
Self also does not mean there can be no white hairs. A self rabbit can have white hairs mixed in among the self colored hairs, called silvering (e.g. Champagne D'Argent):
View attachment 43792
or white patches alternating with self colored patches of hair (called broken-colored)
View attachment 43794
or a white body with colored points (called himalayan):
View attachment 43793
The rabbits above are all technically self black, with the surface color
pattern derived from certain alleles at places other than the A locus (which dictates whether a rabbit is self, tan/otter/marten or agouti).
