My rabbits

I promised to eventually show you my rabbits and tell you about the breeding project I'm doing. Since there's no better time than the present, that is what I have decided to blog about today.

As an introduction, I will tell you what I am aiming for in my breeding project. I started my current project in May '09. Well, if you count the months of research I did before actually beginning the actual breeding, I guess you could say the project's been going since about February '09. Anyway, my ultimate aim is to produce a "line" of rabbits with that have the small, cute dwarf body type, lopped ears, and a very special type of coat. The development of this coat will be by far the biggest achievement when I finally reach my goal. The idea is to develop a coat similar to the rex coat (the rex coat is extremely short, unbelievably soft, and incredibly plush all at the same time) - only longer. So rather than being short and plush, it will be long, silky, but still extremely soft to touch. There used to be several rabbit breeds with this coat, but they have all become virtually extinct. In very recent years, one man in Tasmania has begun to develop a single breed with pretty much the same coat, although it is genetically quite different. Anyway, the point is that the long-haired rex coat is extremely rare, and virtually non-existent outside of Australia. So to have this special coat type on a lop is going to be very exciting.

After less than a year of breeding, and only into the 2'nd generation, I'm am very pleased to announce that we have been fortunate enough to have breed a rabbit with this very coat!! He is one very special rabbit, and we are so proud of his parents for defying all odds and producing him. Well, of course God was the one that lined up all the correct genes that made it possible. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll come back to this rabbit later.

We decided to go about developing our line of "Silky Lops" (that's we we are calling them for now) by hybridising Mini Cashmere Lops with Mini Rex. We already had some excellent quality Mini Cashmere Lops that would be very useful in contributing the dwarf body type, lopped ears, AND long coat. The Mini Rex was used for adding the rex gene into the line.

Below is the original Cashmere we used. Her name is Rosemary, and we bought her from a breeder who acquired her from a friend who in turn purchased her from a pet store. She almost certainly isn't purebred, and she isn't particularly special herself, yet she has amazed us by producing kittens (baby rabbits) of amazing quality!! She is an extraordinary mother, and she has passed on her good maternal instincts to every female she has produced. She is a kind of "matriarch" to our rabbit stud - every single rabbit we have ever bred so far has her as their ancestor.

This is "Charmed" Peter. (All rabbits that have been bred at a registered stud carry the stud prefix as their first name. Peter's breeders had "Charmed" as their stud prefix, so every rabbit they ever bred carried "Charmed" as their first name.) He is a purebred Mini Rex, and very handsome one at that. He won Best Rex at an Online Rabbit Show, which was the first and only show we ever exhibited him at. Quite an achievement for an old fellow - he was already about 3 years old when we purchased him.

Below are the 2 rabbits we retained from Rosemary and Peter's litter. These rabbits are the 1'st generation of our breeding project - also known as F1's (F = generation... don't ask me why, that's just the way things are with Biology). The black one is Pepper (female), and the fawn coloured one is called Muffin (male). Pepper is not looking very good in the photo because she was very pregnant at the time the shot was taken. Pepper turned out to be an AMAZING mother, producing 10 kittens for her first litter. 4 or 5 would have been normal, but 10 is incredible. 1 of them had some birth defect and died on the first day, but Pepper did an excellent job of raising the remaining 9.

Muffin, not to be outdone by any of his accomplished family members, was a miracle in himself. His colour, the official name of which is "Lilac Tort Butterfly", is one of the rarest, hardest-to-breed colours in existence. And the fact that we had no idea that both his parents happened to be carrying the same, rare colour genes made it THAT much more exciting. On top of that, I'm pretty sure that he is the cuddliest, sweetest, most docile, affectionate rabbit ever to have walked the planet. You have to hold him for yourself to understand.

That brings us to the 2'nd generation. Of the 9 kittens raised, only 1 had the rex coat we were looking for. But what a coat! As well as being rexed just like we wanted, this rabbit happened to inherit a long-haired gene from each parent, giving it the extremely rare long-haired rex coat!!! Another bonus is that this rabbit has longer guard hairs than usual. Although this has the undesirable effect of making the coat feel slightly harsher, and less soft to touch, it also keeps the coat matt-free. This is just great for us, because the breeds that used to have this coat used to have a tendency to become permanently matted, which was a real problem. This is what eventually led to their extinction. So we're very glad to be able to start with a matt-free coat, because it means we'll have a lot less to worry about later on. By the way, this rabbit's name is Opus. "Opossum" is a name for the long-haired rex coat, so Opus seemed like a fitting shortening of the word. As well as that, Opus is an Italian word which translates roughly to "an artistic creation."

Opus's brother, Basil, deserves a mention, too. As a bit of background, we weren't expecting to be producing any rabbits with lopped ears until at least the 3'rd or 4'th generation. That would be 1½ - 2 years of breeding... quite a while to have to wait. But then one day when the F2's were about 7 weeks old, I noticed that one of the kittens (Basil), and one ear lopped. I was amazed, and thought I must be seeing things. Maybe he was just hot, and had droopy ears. I pushed the thought aside, dismissing it as too unlikely to be true. But the next day I noticed that BOTH ears were down, and had the most pleasant shock of my year!! We had a lop in the 2'nd generation!! That pretty much meant that we had been saved a whole year's worth of breeding. We had an F2 with the long-haired rex coat. We had an F2 with lopped ears. That means that it is perfectly possible to remate the same parents to each other, and produce another litter which might have a true Silky Lop, with the correct coat AND lopped ears!! Progress is a lot faster than was initially expected. Praise the Lord!!

We will be expecting another F2 litter sometime soon, a repeat breeding of the last litter, but for now that is all there is to report. "That's ALL?!", I hear you say. Okay, I'm sorry I raved on like that so much today. I have trouble controlling myself when it comes to talking about my rabbits. Thank you for bearing with me, and if you have read my blog post all the way down to here, you deserve a medal. *Gives you a forbearance medal*

If you're lucky, it'll be a while before I decide to blog about the rest of my rabbits... *wink*. Any suggestions as to what else you would like me to blog about would be most welcome.

God bless.

Matthew.