skysthelimit":mcosbcdx said:
Zass, it's time for you to ditch that stuff. I've never had anything like that in any of my rabbits.
Though the Angora is a suspected steel carrier, but I'm still waiting for proof of that.
Already done, but you can see why I threw a fit when I first noticed that the steel in my meat mutt litters was coming from the SF bucks!
Here's the thing, I discovered all this through OUTCROSSING (for meat mutts) and I may have never seen it if I'd kept strictly breeding fox to fox, and none of my "purebred" SF kits looked wrong at all, even in front of 4-h judges and in pictures posted here. SO...yeah.
I had to breed to both a visual agouti and a pure self that had already been tested steel-free by being bred to an agouti that DOESN'T CARRY SELF( to confirm that my fox was a genetic agouti) Notice in a full litter there is only ONE kit that I can pick out is a steel, and a rather dark one at that. I believe it is because hidden agouti steels have a tendency to beget more hidden agouti steels. If my opal girl didn't carry self this whole deal would have been easier. But...how many test mutts should I have to own?
I haven't yet found any SF that were free of steel to use as test stock, and I haven't even found one that was able to prove to me that it
wasn't a super steel. (I would need at least one agouti, tort, chinchilla, orange, or you know, something that when visually expressed cannot have steel to prove it, and so far...nothing.
