Since purchasing and importing ‘Baker’, a British Beveren Blue buck from Chris Baker, producing the correct Beveren blue has become a reality.
Breeding and culling for color can feel impossible. And it will be if breeders don’t treat the blues like they’re their own breed. When bred to black rabbits, the color gets darker and darker. If a black rabbit is produced in the litter, they have so many white hairs they could be mistaken for a silver fox. While this may be fine for people who consume their culls, we all run out of cage space eventually.
If you haven’t seen the correct blue in person, it’s very hard to imagine what “dove grey” or “light lavender blue” really mean. In Europe, it’s been described as “cigar smoke blue”. The closest description that most to American breeders would be able to envision is ‘duratray grey’.
The problem with the description of “light lavender blue” is that lavender is considered a shade of purple. Lilac is also a consideres a shade of purple. Many breeders will eventually see a lilac produced in a litter and mistake that for a self blue. Lilacs have brown guard hairs which blend into a dense blue undercoat and can be difficult to identify. The trick for separating lilac from a blue is nailing down what color the skin is around their eyes.
Self blue is on top. Lilac is below. The blue rabbit will have a greyish tint to the skin around the eye. The lilac will have a brighter pink- like toy pig pink.
On the show table, the color varies from a deep blue, to lilac, to frosted, and rarely to the correct blue. The photo below was captured by Karen during the Youth competition at ARBA National Convention in Reno 2019. It shows one of the darker blues on the left, a lilac in the middle, and the correct blue on the right.
The Beveren on the far right is CIL’s Jerry.
Jerry in his coop at Reno. Photo taken by Alix.
Jerry belongs to our daughter. His father won Youth Best of Breed at ARBA Convention 2018 in Springfield, Mass.