Not exactly new, I just haven’t posted about them yet! Back in early 2017 I imported red eyed pied roborovski from Double Special hamstery in Holland. I’ve been working on this line very hard and now have unpatterned ‘cinnamon’ robos and even a red eyed husky.

How does it work? Well, pretty much the same as cinnamon in Syrians. As it’s natural basic phenotype it is an agouti hamster with dark red eyes. Pied robos have brighter red eyes. The colour is a diluted agouti, with both all aspects of the coat colour being diluted as I believe this largely affects the ‘red’ pigment in the coat.

I initially wondered if I’d stumbled across ‘rust’ as we already have the brown eye gene recognised although everyone in the fancy I spoke to has never seen one. However, it soon became obvious that my cinnamon hamsters were exactly the same as those being bred by Casanova hamstery, again in Holland, and we compared notes. The redness of the eyes is harder to see in unspotted animals but the difference in coat colour is very clear. The pictured husky is a good few shades lighter than any black eyed husky I have bred. And the cinnamon, again, is a good few shades lighter than even a pale normal agouti

The gene is recessive so it did take quite a lot of work but I think it’s well worth it for such a pretty roborovski. I’ll be breeding them in both agouti and pied for the moment. I actually nearly lost all of these genes in 2018 due to a virus that wiped out an entire litter and their parents. However, with the remaining ‘carriers’, a lot of luck and the import of a lovely girl called Cindy from Piccoli Amici hamstery in Germany early this year (pictured below with my boy Avocado) I’ve been able to save this gene from extinction in this country.

The application for recognition along with a provisional standard was submitted for discussion in August, awaiting a meeting of our standards committee. Fingers crossed!