Selecting and Improving Desirable Rabbit Traits
Domestication of rabbits from the wild is recent. Rabbit production has several advantages over other farm animal production enterprises especially in terms of low cost and easily available feedstuff, high reproductive efficiency and above all, high profitability.
As such fresh beginners, be they farmers or students, must be acquainted with the basic principles of selecting, breeding, feeding, housing and managing the health of rabbit to achieve the production objectives.
Breeding stocks are selected predominantly from past records of a rabbit or its parents. Selecting on the basis of coat or eye colour is secondary. Quantitative traits such as fertility, growth and feed efficiency, milk production, disease resistance and carcass quality are more desirable basis for selection.
Read Also: Poultry Record- Keeping and Performance Evaluation
High heritability percentage of most quantitative traits in rabbit further ensures that larger proportion of the characters can be passed from parents to offspring, and makes parent’s records a dependable tool for the selection of good traits. Besides selecting desired characteristics in the animal, other techniques for improving such traits in the flock are:
| Line Breeding | This is a continuous mating of subsequent generation to an identified male or its offspring. |
| Out crossing | Mating of unrelated individuals or lines of different breed. This often increases heterozygosity of the genotype |
| Cross breeding | Mating of individuals of two different breeds |
| Inbreeding | Mating of individuals that are more closely related than the average population e.g. mating sire-offspring, brother-sister or offspring-Dam |
Read Also: Breed Characteristics of Rabbit
