About red....

I purchased a red Mini Rex buck because he looked so nice but now that I have been reading information and posts on genetics, I am wondering if that was such a good idea. I have only two does, a blue and an opal. Should I even attempt to breed him to one of them or will I just get a litter of off color babies?

What's in his pedigree and does he have a lighter belly? Red is a hard color to do right because it's technically an agouti color but people have decided in many breeds to breed out the light belly so the rabbit is an even red color. When you cross out from red lines you are likely to lose that even tone so they won't show as well. If the rabbit has nothing but reds behind it then you will probably just get castors out of your does and they may not be show quality. Castor is a basic but difficult color because breeding it out to things can change the width of the bands on the hairs so that it gets blacker or redder. It's suggested to only breed castor to castor and red to red if you don't know what you are doing and don't want to risk making offspring with poor color. If he has something else in his pedigree it's possible you could make show quality blue, black, or opal but you'll get some castors of questionable quality no matter what. Any offspring bred back to the does, including castors, should produce some show quality colors but you'll have some brood/pet quality in there. If you breed self offspring together you can make torts but I'm not sure what quality they would be.

If you want to maximize how many show quality offspring you get instead of playing some russian roulette, I find it entertaining but I don't have a problem butchering extra mini rex, you'd be better off with a black, blue, or opal buck and a nonextension doe (tort or red) for the red. If you are breeding to opal I would avoid a black buck with a chocolate, lilac, or rew background because you might create chocolate based agoutis that are not recognized even though lilac based agouti is accepted as lynx. It's really annoying since unless you stay within the diluted colors of blue, lilac, lynx, and opal you can quite easily make chocolate agoutis on accident. You could use a lilac buck but I wouldn't recommend it unless you find one with amazing type and coat. You'll get richer colors sticking with black based rabbits instead of chocolate based and they tend to have better type anyway. Future generations would also all have to be kept as the dilute version or only the self offspring to again avoid chocolate agoutis if you introduce a rabbit that is not a diluted color later on. Just playing with the self colors is a lot easier than mixing the agouti colors.

This has color crossing suggestions http://mr-colors.tripod.com/
and here are all the accepted varieties to date http://www.nmrrc.net/varieties.htm

Thanks a lot akane!