What?! You just completely confused me. Blossom is broken? How can you tell? How do I find out for sure? Is my buck, Boomer, broken too? If I was to get another doe, how do I make sure she’s not broken too? I don’t want to breed them and possibly bring sickly or deformed bunnies into the world
Broken is a pattern of white overlaid on a colored coat, that has a wide range of expression. The classic broken has color on the ears, color around the eyes, color on the nose, and color on the body in the form of spots or patches, like this Broken Black Mini Rex:
The harlequin rabbit has patches of black and orange on its coat. If you think of a tricolor as a broken harlequin, you can see that Boomer has a fairly typical broken pattern.
There are a lot of little modifying genes that determine just how the broken gene gets expressed. Some of the "marked" breeds like the English Spot and the Rhinelander are really picky about how their rabbits' markings look; the folks who breed them work hard to get just the right modifiers. The most extreme expression of this is found in the Blanc de Hotot and Dwarf Hotot, where the markings have been reduced to just a tiny band of color around the rabbit's eyes, and the rest of the rabbit is completely white (though non-showable animals of these breeds may have more color, most often on the ears).
At the other extreme is the "booted" broken. The booted broken usually has some white on its feet (white "boots"), maybe a little white mark on its face, and probably some white on its chest. In many breeds, booted brokens don't have enough white on them to be showable (at any rate,the American Rabbit Breeder's Association standards generally require the colored areas to be within certain percentages of the total area of the coat). There are other genes that can put just a little bit of white on the face and feet, and maybe the chest, too (like the Dutch genes), but when the white on the chest seems sort of splashed on, with colored areas in it, you can be pretty sure it's the broken gene causing it.
This guy is booted (also Mini Rex).
As to how you know if a rabbit is a broken - broken is a dominant gene, meaning that, if the rabbit has it, you will see it. The only color you can't see it on is white (since the broken gene causes areas that lack pigment on the coat, when you have a rabbit that has no pigment in its coat anyway, you can't see any difference). So with the exception of Blue-eyed White, Ruby-eyed White, or Ermine, you will know if a rabbit has the broken gene, just by looking at it.
I’m having trouble posting a new question. Could you possibly explain how I go about starting a new post?
Go to the sub-forum you want to post in (for example, Meat Rabbits). Near the top of the page, just to the left of your avatar, is a little bar that says "post new thread." Click on it, and the rest should be self-explanatory (assuming everything is working as it should; somewhere between my computer and this forum, I've been having some issues lately).
Hello 
love our NZ rabbits, goats and chickens, dogs and cat...lots of great information and people here......enjoy
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