Agouti Pattern - Regular vs. Wide Band

 

 

 

Fawn is an agouti pattern, classified as "wide band".   This photo was taken of a 4-month-old English Angora with wool parted on its back but not using a blower.   As we can see that there are wide bands of different shades of golden colors.  



Chestnut is also an agouti pattern; according to the description of chestnut in SOP:

Surface color is a rich chestnut, ticked with black tipped guard hairs.  It shall have one or more intermediate bands of tan, alternating with slate, with a blue-gray undercolor.

This photo was taken of a 5-month-old French Angora when the blower is on.  It clearly shows all the requirements of the color bands.  

As we can see the bands are narrower than the bands in the fawn shown above. 

Chinchilla is also in the regular agouti pattern group, the major difference is the all the tan coloring are eliminated by the dark chin gene c(chd).  Unfortunately the chinchilla Angora has not been seen for quite a long time thus we could not show a photo.

One may notice that the first photo was a junior English Angora and the second photo is a junior French Angora.  The frustration of raising the agouti pattern Angora is that the bands would be hard to see or even altogether disappear from the long wool, regardless of how good the rabbit is.   The above photo was taken of an 8-month-old fawn French Angora that has won major awards with this coat.

 

When parting the wool of the above gorgeous French Angora, the bands are very hard to see.  

In general the judges are not as stringent about the bands on the wide band Angora such as fawn, cream and red.  The width of the bands and the non-extension ee gene make the distinction of bands hard to be visible.   In the case of the regular agouti pattern such as chestnut, opal, chocolate agouti, copper, lynx... judges tend to fault the color if the bands are not present.  It is hard to make a senior Angora with length and density to clearly show the regular banding thus such colors are harder to show.