So I have been doing a lot of rabbit-related thinking lately, well I guess I always have rabbits on my brain but, more than usual. I'm not sure what sparked it but I think it has something to do with a comment the Island judge made about our rabbits here in the Maritimes being "good quality, but not quite at that level you find down in the states some places and at convention". Ever since then I've been thinking well, why can't we be at that level?
Over the past 12 years, I have learned an insane amount about rabbits. Even from the beginning I just couldn't get enough and would read every book I could get my hands on (this was before we had the internet). I used to spend countless hours in the barn or on my bedroom floor with a rabbit and a standard of perfection, studying it until I understood and could see for myself. The conformation side of things always fascinated me.
So if I can pick the perfect rabbit, I can surely breed the perfect rabbit myself, no problem right? Well... not even close. To breed the perfect rabbit you need several things. The first thing is knowledge, which is something that you can't obtain overnight. It takes months, even years of watching and listing to judges, and studding standards before you can truly understand the standard of a breed. If you aren't breeding two rabbits together in order to improve certain characteristics of the breed, than you are breeding without a purpose, which is useless. So basically you want to look at ...Let's say a holland lop buck, just for example. A buck with a beautiful head and a nice set of ears, the downfall is that he fails slightly in the hindquarters. So obviously you want to breed him to your doe that has the best hindquarters, with the goal of producing offspring with the same strong head and ears as the buck, but with the hindquarters of the doe.
The next thing you need is some money and some good friends. You need money to buy your starter rabbits, and you need some good breeder friends who are willing to sell you some quality animals to get you started. It sounds almost easy. Being in Canada, especially over here in PEI is what can complicate things. I love PEI but trying to get rabbits here from the states is something else. In the summer it absolutely cannot be done, the airlines refuse to ship. It is also very expensive and many breeders just don't want to ship for whatever reasons.
You will also need plenty of time and patience to breed the perfect rabbit. Don't expect to buy two quality rabbits and for those two to automatically click and produce beautiful quality babies on your first try (especially if you're raising a marked breed like Dutch!). Some lines and genetics simply do not mix well and having two beautiful animals does in no way guarantee beautiful offspring.
Taking all of these things into consideration, I have come up with a plan. Since my biggest obstacle always seems to be how to get the rabbits here, why don't I go to the rabbits? So, I'm planning on making the 25 hour drive across Canada and the States to Indiana in fall of 2011 for the week long American Rabbit Breeders Convention. Now, sure, it's a long wait until fall of 2011, but that just means I have roughly 16 months to get things in place. While I'm there I would like to pick up a nice English Lop and some Dutch. I'm so excited to start planning for the trip!
So that's my recipe for producing a perfect rabbit, maybe after I'm done getting my ingredients...er starter rabbits, I'll go back another year and be able to compete with my own home bred bunnies at convention level, who knows?!
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