A Shout Out To The Literary Junkies

A Shout Out To The Literary Junkies

Our French Angora rabbits haven’t been receiving any attention on the blog lately in favor of other matters. Now we have some shenanigans to report: Hester had a pearl. No joke, the Scarlet Letter is playing out in our rabbitry.

To recap, we decided to have a literary theme in naming our rabbits. It started with Hester, a self black doe whose owner had named everyone in her litter after characters from the Scarlet Letter. It seemed appropriate to carry on the theme of literature with our own rabbits after that.

Apparently, Hester decided to keep with her own theme in having a pearl herself. A ‘smoke pearl’ to be exact:

Remember that ‘mystery kit‘ that we thought was a lilac tortoiseshell? Boy, were we wrong.

 

Smoke pearl is a really nice color, and I’m sure for Rachel’s spinning purposes it will make for stunning yarn. Unfortunately, it’s not a color that we’re particularly interested in.

This color is a dilute form of seal, which is the father Aesop’s color. We’re considering changing his name to Dimmesdale.

Kidding aside, you may think that she looks a lot like the blue rabbits that we have, so I got a picture of this kit beside her cousin Betsy so you can see the difference:

Pearl is on the left, Betsy is on the right.

Notice how the blue is, well, bluish? And how the smoke pearl is more, well, smoky? In case you couldn’t tell, there’s a reason why these color names are what they are.

Meanwhile, just as Hawthorne named Hester’s daughter Pearl to draw a parallel to the irritation and suffering that an oyster endures to create a beautiful pearl, we may have to call this kit ‘Pearl’ because honestly, I’m pretty darn irritated!

Why? Well, while I had been somewhat aware of rabbit coat color genetics, I had been unaware that Aesop’s chinchilla gene (the gene that makes colors like smoke pearl and seal) could show up when paired with Hester. And it’s irritating because I hadn’t really wanted more of the chinchilla gene in our rabbitry. Yet of the 6 does we have to choose from to keep back, the pearl is the best one of the bunch! Maybe instead of Dimmesdale we should change Aesop’s name to Murphy’s Law.

Why would we not want the chinchilla gene? That’s a very good question to ask! What? You didn’t ask? Well, here’s the answer anyway: genes like seal and smoke pearl are more difficult to manage. Without going into too much detail, when mixed with other genes they can produce unshowable colors. If you look at the photo where I’ve parted her fur, you can see some ‘shading’ that takes place with the dark & light grays and the tans. When you cross that shading to other colors, say fawn, it creates a color that isn’t sanctioned by ARBA (American Rabbit Breeders Association) and therefore the rabbit would never be able to be shown.

We are more a ‘working’ farm (it sounds funny to consider ourselves a farm, but here we are) than we are a ‘show’ farm, and unshowable colors make fiber just as nice as showable colors. However, we would like to show as a side hobby, and a large share of the market for French Angoras are show people. So, you can see the conundrum this makes for us in deciding who to keep.

Now if you excuse me, I have to go put a red ‘A’  on the front of Hester’s hutch.

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