Should you breed different Silver colors together?
This is one of the most frequently asked Silver questions.
If you are looking for a short answer, it's No.
If you are looking for a long answer, read on!
If you are an experienced Silver breeder and have comments on this topic, please let us know and we will post them!
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CAN YOU BREED SILVER COLORS TOGETHER?
CAN you? Sure, a black and a fawn will make babies together...as much as Silvers will make babies at all. Should you though?
Varieties should not be crossbred within Silvers. Having three SEPARATE varieties has always added a unique factor to the sterling breed. Some breeders say that raising all three varieties is like raising three separate breeds. Not that the standards are different, but that you can't interbreed stock.
Interbreeding colors makes your stock less desirable from a sales standpoint, because most people do not crossbreed varieties and will not purchase rabbits with a mixed background.
Picture a fawn silver, or go pull one out of your barn. Admire the pure fawn color, silver on golden orange. The fawn color in silvers is amazingly clean. In some breeds, the fawn is covered with smut, or dark ticking especially around the flanks, face, and ears. This smut is caused by genetic modifiers that have been successfully bred out of fawn silvers, leaving us with a clean gold color. However, black and brown also carry those genetic modifiers for smutty fawns. The smut may or may not be bred out of blacks or browns, we don't know because we can't see it on them anyway. But when you take a black or brown to a fawn, you could be unwittingly introducing smut modifiers, and spoiling generations of pure gold. Color quality may also diminish when breeding brown to black.
When we begin breeding black and fawn together we will eventually arrive at tortoise, an unrecognized color.
If you have any further questions, feel free to e-mail one of our officers. We will be glad to help!
Black, Brown, Fawn - Yet Silver.
Black, Brown, Fawn. Such a unique set of varieties there are in silvers! How did we come to have such a trio of colors? And how do we manage them?
Just how rare are these colors? Let me give you an appreciation for how unique our silver colors really are. In my opinion, the silvering is completely lost on a long rollback coat, like that of a Silver Fox. Unless the ticking is contrasted by a smooth, sharp flyback pelt, I don't believe that the shiny silver look is achieved. So, with that in mind, consider the following statistics.
The black silver color is recognized in only five breeds in the United States: the Silver, Silver Fox, Mini Lop, French lop, and English lop. Only the silver and English lop have flyback coats, and I don't think that silvered English Lops even exist! I've seen pictures of a silvered Mini Lop, but that is probably the most rare Mini Lop color. I've heard of a silvered Mini Lop being disqualified for excessive white hairs, because the judge didn't know any better. Lops also recognize fawn, brown, and blue silver. However, those colors rarely if ever occur. The lop color standard doesn't give any description for the base color. We assume that "brown" is supposed to mean chestnut like in Silvers. No breed besides the silver recognizes a color called "brown".
How did these colors come to be? The original Silver variety was gray, which we now call black. The gray silvers are one of the oldest of rabbit breeds, kept as early as 1500 AD. The first fawn Silvers appeared in the 1870s, called creams. Because they were sports from the blacks, I believe that these were actually a tort, and it became fawn when brown was developed in the 1880's, from crosses to a Belgian Hare. In other parts of the world, a blue Silver is recognized. But if we brought blue Silvers here and interbred them with our current colors, we'd end up with blue torts, creams, and opals!
It's a good thing we keep our colors separate!
