How to prevent rabbit breed degeneration? Master these practical methods
Causes of degeneration
Extensive management and inbreeding. Only emphasizing the rabbit's trait of eating grass without supplementing with concentrated feed causes nutritional deficiency and breed degeneration. Ignoring the blood relationship of breeding rabbits and mating closely related animals causes poor disease resistance in offspring rabbits, slow growth, smaller body size, deformities, and breed degeneration.
Lack of strict selection measures: not paying attention to selecting and retaining breeding rabbits according to breed characteristic requirements, often selling off the large, fast-growing, well-conditioned ones first and keeping the small, thin, weak ones to continue raising, causing gradual breed degeneration.
Mating too early and kindling too frequently. Breeding rabbits are allowed to mate as soon as they pass sexual maturity, and no attention is paid to the age difference between male and female rabbits, resulting in old-to-old, old-to-young, and young-to-young pairings, which prevents breed characteristics from being stably inherited. Some @#@248@#@ households are eager for quick success and mate frequently by blood, and do not pay attention to supplementing nutrition for female rabbits, making them weak and sickly, and the offspring rabbits they produce develop poorly and have poor disease resistance, causing breed degeneration.
Prevention methods
Regardless of the economic type and breed of rabbits being raised, a core breeding rabbit group that conforms to the breed characteristics and can meet the breed's production indicators must be cultivated and retained in a planned way. The selection and retention method: after the offspring rabbits are born, mark the ones to be retained first with iodine tincture or color, and frequently observe their growth and development, with preliminary selection of young rabbits, final selection of adolescent rabbits, and careful selection of adult rabbits. For those that conform to breed characteristics and have outstanding growth and development, focus on cultivation and carry out meticulous management in all aspects. When putting them into production, be careful to mate the best male rabbits with the best female rabbits.
In breeding and production, continuously purify and rejuvenate the breed, paying attention to using excellent male rabbits to improve ordinary or small female rabbits, and then selecting excellent male and female individuals from their offspring. Never use ordinary male rabbits or small male rabbits to mate with excellent female rabbits. At the same time, pay attention to performance selection and breeding of the offspring.
Strictly control the initial mating age and body weight of breeding rabbits; those that have not reached the initial mating age and body weight must absolutely not be mated. Offspring produced by prime-age breeding male rabbits have relatively stable genetic performance.