Rabbit Genetics / Line Breeding

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:10]Hi everybody, Bobby [music] from the Ravryer Center and today I wanted to go over a little bit about rabbit genetics [music] and uh even lion breeding. Here we go.

[00:00:23]So, priority one was always to fill the freezer. [music] And it wasn't until I started getting requests from people for certain colors of rabbits, I started to get into the books and learned how what was happening. And I wanted to share that I had rabbits that would kick out these different colors. [music] And I was scratching my head trying to figure out why in the world are these rabbits chestnut? Why are they, you know, what?

[00:00:45]I don't even know if there were Facebook groups back then. There might have been, but I didn't know about them. And not having anybody explaining to me this good information. It took me a long time to get here. So, I wanted to share what I learned. I ended up breaking out my rabbit books and reading up. So, all rabbits have two alals, and this affects the look and the color of your rabbit, as well as other factors. We inherit one alil from each parent. So, some are dominant and some are recessive. [music] And based on the combination, they'll either be expressed and show or they'll stay hidden and [music] you won't know about them unless you do test breedings. You can use a Punet square to see the percentages, the chances [music] that you'll get certain colors. It's a awesome tool. And once you find out what those alals are, you can put them into those boxes and you can do the combinations and see [music] 50% of this or 25% of that. And it's really there's no guarantees, but they're it's just it comes down [music] to chances.

[00:01:50]Okay, so just to reiterate, every rabbit has two alals, two genes.

[00:01:56]Okay, so let's let's write it out and we'll try to picture it. So, and there's dominant genes and recessive genes. So, first let's go with the buck and the dough.

[00:02:11]So, they're going to breed and then they're going to have rabbits.

[00:02:17][music] And these are going to be a combination of this. [music] So you can see how these different combinations of alals will be inherited. Okay. So I hope that makes sense. So you can Google rabbit chart genotype and [music] there will there's a letter that is an abbreviation for every color and every style. And [music] there's so many different combinations coded A, B, C, D, and E and and combinations of of different letters.

[00:02:52]They all mean something different. And [music] having two alals from each parent and it being able to have a combination of the two makes it possible to have hundreds of different possibilities. [music] So if you want to find out may maybe what your alals are or looking at your pedigree or um just a little bit of help from the genotype chart, this is what you do. You take that information and put it into this punet square. We're going to do a punet square real quick. These are really cool because this is how you can find out what percentage of what rabbit is going to be this color. And you know, this is strictly for for your colors. So, here we go. This is this is how you do a punet square. So, we have a square [music] and mom's going to be up here.

[00:03:40]Dad's going to be over here.

[00:03:44]Okay, now he's 50%.

[00:03:48]Mom's 50%.

[00:03:51]She has two alals. Okay, so we'll do a goodie.

[00:03:57]And a goodie is dominant. So we're going to give it a capital A and solid black is lowercase A.

[00:04:09]So they have the same alals.

[00:04:18]We all have two alals and one's going to be dominant and one's going to be recessive. In this hypothetical case, mom and dad have the same alals, but they're not related. So, [music] uh, how is that going to play out in this punet square? So, we're going to drop we're going to drop mom's down.

[00:04:32]We'll have moms be red. So, how the punet square works is we got mom's alals up top and they're dropping down into these boxes. So one al will stay on the right side. The other al will stay on the left. Then we have dad's alals over here. And we're putting dad's alals over in the box. One on top, one on bottom.

[00:04:51]Now we have a perfect 25% chance because there's four alals into this combination. And we can see what our chances are of getting what. So it says here that any again anytime there's a dominant gene which is a capital letter that is going to show that's going to be expressed in this we can see that there's a capital letter capital letter capital those are all goody.

[00:05:17]>> So those 75% chance that we're going to have a goody rabbits but this right here shows that when the two recessives come together that's when they get expressed.

[00:05:27]That's the only time they get expressed.

[00:05:30]So 25% chance that we're going to have solid black. And that's how you find out what you're going to get. So it's really important to know the genotype, check the locust, and then fill out the chart.

[00:05:44]So the phenotype doesn't necessarily tell you what the genotype is unless you do test breedings. But um there are things like Charlie. A Charlie is a rabbit that has two parents that are both broken. And that means they've doubled up on the alals. And broken is a dominant alil anyway. [music] So that means every rabbit in the offspring will be broken. And you can usually spot a Charlie because it doesn't have a lot of broken on it. But the good news is that you can [music] expect the offspring to have good patterns of broken. a Charlie when the when the two alals [music] match up that's homozygous not by relation and then there's homozygous IBD inherited by descent [music] so that's using line breeding line breeding is kind of jumping to the the head of the line so in the punet square when the alals don't match up when they when they're different that's called hetererozygous and when the alals are the same that's homozygous.

[00:06:47]So you could be breeding these rabbits over time, these rabbits that have favorable traits and over time you could actually drop an alil from your line and that's called genetic drift. That's just a numbers game. Over time it just happens. In most cases rabbit trees once they get established they don't [music] want to outcross unless they have to because that means that they have to go back to the drawing board. They have it's diesel truck this rabbit [music] that they don't know what the genetics are. They don't know what's recessive, what uh they have to test breed and they kind of have to start all over again.

[00:07:19]That [music] once you know what you're looking for, once you can spot things you don't want in your line, u you know what rabbits to callull and what rabbits to keep.

[00:07:33]So [music] line breeding is a very careful, thoughtout program that you can get two birds with one stone. You can fill the freezer with rabbits that are unfavorable and then you can improve your herd with the rabbits that are. You can breed two rabbits and lock [music] in favorable traits so you can get the results that you want. When you breed related rabbits, they will inherit identical alals [music] and that homozygosity will create those terrific, beautiful rabbits. You can call any rabbits don't look the way you want or don't carry those traits that you [music] want. I wouldn't recommend line breeding if you haven't made the decision to callull rabbits or [music] if you're just, you know, starting out and you don't really know what to look for or what you want. [music] Um because you could really, if you were to breed two rabbits that had bad traits, say weak shoulders or just, you know, didn't have the body type that you [music] would want and then you bred it with another rabbit like that, that would lock that trait in. You would, you know, [music] inadvertently would have messed up your herd.

[00:08:37]and now you've you've ruined it, you know, and so so just do a little research, figure out what you want, and then [music] maybe entertain that. We know this doesn't work in humans. You know, we we've heard all those stories about royal blood and and they were trying to keep the the blood in the family and that's how you ended up getting Charles II, the imbred king of Spain in 1665, the guy with the jaw and the tongue and he was infertile and he died at 38 without an heir because, you know, of course you can't callull humans, but you can callull livestock.

[00:09:08]And that's why you can't imbreed [music] people. You know, if you do entertain the idea of line breeding, don't worry.

[00:09:15]It's not anything new or scary. I mean, it's just a tool that the breeders use when it comes to the animal world. This is how the breeders get the best thoroughbred horses. This is how, you know, breeders will get 7/8 of a champion animal. So, so I just wanted to share this. I thought it was really interesting. I'm reading a book um about rabbit color. I'll put it down in the description if you want to check it out.

[00:09:40]Uh it's a pretty good book. It's got a lot of good information in it and I recommend it. So, I hope you enjoyed this and it was just an eye openener.

[00:09:46]Hopefully, this helps you with your genetics and um I'll do a follow-up video down the line and we'll talk more about this. Thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next video.

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