Breeding genetics

[Maplegrove Rabbitry]

This will be a little long of a post and a little scattered so I apologize for that.

Quick background, we've been breeding pure bred nz rabbits for almost 2 years now. We've discussed a lot of directions for the rabbitry and the idea for now is to develope a strong line of blues and reds and show them at arba and sell them.

Current stock is low, we had a rough Couple of weeks where we lost 2 of our breeders so we are rebuilding. We have cages for 12 rabbits and are trying to only keep the babies that help us advance our lines.

For the blues we have a solid buck who was over 5lbs at 10 weeks and has average confirmation. We are looking to breed him with a white we have that we know has recessive d series gene and will throw a doe. This one is straight forward.

Onto the part I need help with. Our red line has good confirmation but weak growth rate. Only 4lbs 10oz at 10 weeks. Without going into boring extra detail, I'll explain that we are considering mixing our blues with our red to get better breeding stock. So my question is if anyone has mixed blues and reds and had any advice on ending up with reds. And what practices people have when breeding for growth rate to get consistent 5lbs at 10 weeks.

 

[Alaska Satin]

Onto the part I need help with. Our red line has good confirmation but weak growth rate. Only 4lbs 10oz at 10 weeks. Without going into boring extra detail, I'll explain that we are considering mixing our blues with our red to get better breeding stock. So my question is if anyone has mixed blues and reds and had any advice on ending up with reds. And what practices people have when breeding for growth rate to get consistent 5lbs at 10 weeks.

I have done this cross, and in a situation where you can't just go buy better red stock (AK, for instance!) IMHO it's worth doing. Dealing with some color issues is worth the headache if it's leading toward great type. As my good friend puts it, it makes sense to to build the house before you paint it! And especially if you want your rabbits to compete and sell at ARBA shows, they'll need to have excellent type: in most areas, NZs tend to be extremely competitive.

The drawback with a red x blue cross - or really a red x anything else cross - is that it usually takes a while to recover good red color. A couple of things happen along the way back to red.

First, you generally lose the intensity and depth of red color, because red x red adds/preserves modifiers that turn regular orange into an intense red, but other colors do not usually carry those modifiers. Other colors also do not usually carry the wideband gene w that gives good depth of red color. Here is the result of a red buck crossed with a red doe that was out of a blue line:

The sire of this bunny was a fantastic NZR with outstanding color. This bunny was not a fawn, but as you can see, his color leaves a lot to be desired; he's also got smut on his ears that the sire did not have.

Also, if you use a blue, in the F3 or later generations you'll start getting fawns (dilute reds) as the hidden recessive dilute alleles meet up.

However, eventually you can get back to good color. You'll most likely have a lot of color culls along the way, but in a meat breed especially, you can just eat your mistakes.

And what practices people have when breeding for growth rate to get consistent 5lbs at 10 weeks.

I've found that choosing rabbits with good growth rates, rather than simply large rabbits, has been key. I had some very big bucks (10+ lbs) but they took almost a year to get there. Once I started keeping track of growth rates and using that as my guide, I saw fairly quick improvement. I select breeders based on a number of different criteria, so it did not happen overnight, but as recently as 5-6 years ago my Satins took 12 weeks to get to 4.0 - 5.0 lbs. Now they consistently hit 4.5 - 5.5 lbs by 8-9 weeks.