Breeding Fun with a REW (Ruby-Eyed White)

Because you never know what you are going to get

By Lydia

Well, last time we bred Snowball and Cookie, we thought we’d get some brokens and some self chocolates.  Well, if you read some of our early posts, you know how that turned out.  We had a few surprises.  More about that later.

Here are a couple thoughts that might help you in your breedings.

Actually, there are ways to figure out what you might get.  You need to determine your rabbits genotype as best as possible.  But with REWs, this can be hard, because you never know what they might be hiding.  You might a wrong guess, like we did with Snowball.  Actually, it wasn’t us.  The pedigree we got from the breeder indicated she was aa instead of Aa, which she obviously is.  

One way of finding out what colors you may get is using Punnett squares.  It is easy to do, but it can take a long time if your rabbits are very genetically diverse.  

Snowball:  Phenotype--REW; genotype--AaBbccDdE_

The other way is by breeding.  It takes longer to know what your rabbit has, but it’s easier on the brain.  We found out that we should not breed Cookie with Snowball anymore.  Half of their offspring will be unshowable colors, like agouti steels.  Cookie is an absolutely gorgeous broken chocolate.  His parents were both steels.  Cookie is a double steel, but we didn’t realize this--often a double steel cancels out the steel appearance.  It is only by breeding that you can learn whether a rabbit whose parents were both steel is in actuality a double steel. 

Cookie:  Phenotype--broken chocolate; genotype--aabbCCDdEsEs

In this breeding, we also learned that Snowball hides agouti. Since she hides agouti and agouti is dominant, and Cookie is a double steel and steel is dominant, they made steel agouti. Two of their six surviving kits were chocolate steel agouti.  Unshowable.  

Bubbles:  Phenotype--chocolate agouti steel; genotype--AabbCcD_Es_

This go around we are going to identify whether Buddy carries REW.  If he does, half the litter will be REW.  The other colors we are most likely to get are:  agouti, self black, blue agouti, self blue, chocolate agouti, and self chocolate.  The kits are due October 1.