Double check and make sure he's talking about the Broucke Charcoal. Tasco, Busse, and French Blue were all called charcoals as well (any mutation causing a colored belly is in the charcoal series, whether it's recessive or not), though they were known to be dominant, producing grey bellies in the first generation. Both the Busse and French Blue in the heterozygous form presented bellies that definitely showed grey, but tolerable enough to be classed as standards at shows. I have no idea when the word "ebony" began being used to describe any mutation causing a colored belly, but it replaced the word "charcoal" at some point. Either way, ebony is not a mutation and shouldn't be thought of as one, it is merely a term used to describe a phenotype. The Broucke Charcoal still remains a recessive mutation in the ebony/charcoal series.
Why work with ebonies at all if the market disapproves of dark bellies? Why bother improving them if they're never going to be as desirable as standard pelts, even if they were of equal quality? It's amazing to me ebonies survived at all, and another Lloyd Sullivan didn't destroy all animals with the mutation because it was deemed unfit to pelt.
Personally, I don't like the look of the (Broucke) Charcoal, and I would not choose to work with them. I prefer the glossy appearance of other mutations over the matte typical of charcoals. That's just my preference, regardless of where the market is leaning or what the current pet color fad is. However, I still believe any mutation is worth preserving, just to have it in the gene pool.
How many other spontaneous mutations have occurred, but were bred out instead of developed, just because they weren't favored by the market? What if a new mutation in the ebony series were to occur? Would we be able to recognize it? Even if it popped out of two supposedly pure standards, it's more likely to be said that there must have been ebony in the lines (especially since Busse and French Blue were called standards and bred into standard lines), rather than even remotely considered a genuinely new mutation.
I am in strong favor of separating the ebony mutations, and tracking genotypes rather than phenotypes, for that very reason: so we know what we have.
