Political Congress

This rabbit was supposed to be dinner. In 1919 a French farmer found one in his barn with patchy, balding fur, figured it was a sick runt, and tossed it in with the meat rabbits headed for the local priest. The priest took one look at the soft, velvety coat and pulled it out of the meat pile. The farmer's name was Désiré Caillon. The priest, Abbé Gillet, knew nothing about genetics. He could just tell that the fur on this little animal felt different from every other rabbit in the French countryside. So he bought a second one with the same coat from Caillon and started breeding them. By 1924, Gillet had about 150 of them. He sold his first batch (one male and two regular females) for 6,000 francs, which was roughly $1,000 at the time. He called the breed Castorrex, mashing together the French word for beaver (the fur looked like beaver pelts) and the Latin word for king. That same year, the rabbit went on display at the Paris International Rabbit Show. Two American breeders, John Fehr and Alfred Zimmerman, bought a pair and shipped them home. By 1929, the breed was officially recognized in the US. The velvet coat comes from a single missing letter of DNA, tucked inside a gene called LIPH. LIPH makes a chemical the body needs to grow normal rabbit hair. Take that one letter out, and the long stiff outer hairs (the ones that stick up on a regular rabbit) shrink down until they are the same length as the soft fluffy hairs underneath. Every hair on the animal ends up the same height. That is what makes the coat feel like velvet when you run a hand over it. The same mutation also packs the hairs much closer together. The best Rex coats fit 15,000 to 38,000 individual hairs into a single thumbnail-sized patch of skin, roughly the same density as chinchilla fur. The black-and-tan look in the photo comes from a completely separate gene. Breeders call it the otter pattern. It paints the back, head, and ears solid black, then turns the belly, the rims of the eyes, and the insides of the ears a soft cream color, with a reddish line where the two halves meet. The same kind of markings you see on a Doberman. The fur industry still treats Rex pelts as the closest substitute for beaver, seal, and chinchilla. The whole breed exists because a village priest a hundred years ago looked at a runt nobody wanted and saw something worth keeping.