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Cattle Cait

Cattle Cait

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I've got a litter in the nestbox that's French Angora x American Sable, what will I be expecting here? I know they won't be completely wooly like Mama, but will I be able to work with anything they might produce?

See, I've been offered some purebred Angoras, but want to know if I could just keep some of these mutts back instead. If they won't be wooly, I'll just take these ones that I'm being offered.
 
You should take the ones offered to you. Unless your sable is carrying the wool gene, your kits will all be short haired. The upside is that Frenchies have a nice meaty body, so you'll have some good eating kits. I started into meat buns by crossing mutt does with my angoras bucks. Kits were all short haired, but built like a brick.
 
The wooly gene is recessive so you likely won't have much to work with. It is actually pretty rare to get an angora cross with tufts of longer hair - most are smooth coated.

Most of the fuzzier angora crosses actually have two angora genes but lack the modifiers that make an English / French / German / Giant / Jersey Wooly have their unique looks since the non-angora parent was never selected for them.

It's like breeding a rex carrier to a rex carrier - the resulting rex furred kits usually have very poor quality fur.
 
Mods for more or less guard hairs, mods for crip, some for where the hair appears, since French are clean and English and Germans have wool everywhere. I had a EA/FA cross, the wool was cottonly, his feet were furred but his face was clean like french. I bred him to my FA doe, lost her size, the kits have more guard hairs, faces and feet are furred.
 
Most of my Frenchis were selected for body type and for wool production, although the lines my stock come out of do show and win frequently, but my rabbits from that line are pure French, but have whiskers and mops. No where near to the extent that a English would, but they are certainly there. It is mostly just medium length guard hair and no wool, but I think it is just a side effect of selecting for such heavily wooled rabbits.

It doesn't help that the breeder likes the cute little alfalfa tuft between the ears, but hey, they are some of the most mellow, best wooled frenchies I can get my hands on, so I am more than happy to deal with a little extra face wool than standard would like to see.

Actually, the only Frenchie I have that has the immaculate furnishing the standard calls for is very runty. At nine months she's only about 8 pounds. A little sad when you compare her to the six month old in the cage next to her that already had about two pounds more on her!
 

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