Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
Rabbits for reward
39 YEARS AGO
Selective breeding is essential to produce rabbits with long and high-quality wool, says two Gauteng breeders.
There are three ways to make money out of rabbits. You can breed them for meat, or you can sell them as stud animals, or you can make money out of their wool. People who dislike the idea of slaughtering them could well profit from the experience of Tjaart and Caroline Steenekamp, of De Deur, near Vereeniging, who are producing Angora rabbits for stud and for their wool.
Caroline is the daughter of the well-known Cape Town breeder and Aubrey judge, Marion Keller, who had a lot to do with developing the Angora rabbit in South Africa. Caroline took over the rabbitry and continued improving the stock after her mother retired in 1970.
The strain was started with a pair of black fluffy rabbits in about 1952. When a good-quality long-woolled white rabbit had been developed from these, it was further improved by introducing a strain of high-quality British ‘Snowball’ Angora blood in about 1967, and a strain of the large French Angora rabbit in the early ‘70s.
The overseas bloodlines were introduced into the Keller strain to improve the size and wool-bearing capacity of the animals, but they brought various genetic problems such as splayed legs, buck teeth and floppy ears, which took several generations to breed out again. Through a programme of rigid selection, the Steenekamp’s herd has been brought to a high degree of breed purity; the animals are well-formed in the typical ‘snowball’ shape, and they have a good wool production, giving an average of about 680g a year.
The production of wool is strongly emphasised because Caroline clips the wool four times a year, and spins it into thread on an old-fashioned spinning-wheel for making up into garments that command good prices.
With an eye to this kind of ‘cottage industry’, they have concentrated on producing animals with longwool fibres (about 75mm) that will take and hold dye colouration. Caroline prefers to use natural dyes because artificial colours look too ‘brassy’ for the soft Angora wool.
However, Caroline is not satisfied with having to dye the wool. To produce a range of natural colours in Angora-rabbit wool, she has begun an ambitious programme of crossbreeding with various other breeds, and line breeding the offspring to produce blue, smoky and brown Angoras. Several of these new strains are into their third generation and are showing promise. Furthest towards ‘perfection’ are the smoky Angoras; the wool is not yet of the finest grade, but has a good length and spinability.
Another strain has also been started with Angora does being crossed with Satin bucks. The first generation had a remarkable colour tending towards lilac, but the second generation has white wool with a definite satiny sheen, and a length somewhat better than that of the Satin ancestors.
This article has been edited to adhere to the current style of
Farmer’sWeekly.
A by-product of this crossbreeding programme has been the discovery that when Angoras are crossed with other breeds, the offspring are much larger than either of the parents (by anything up to 1,5kg), and have a fine, high-quality meat.
Caroline puts her does to the buck at about six months. The babies are left with the mother for about eight weeks after which they are put into outdoor colonies. These consist of large wooden boxes raised slightly off the ground connected to runs that have wire-mesh floors (to limit their propensity for digging), which allow them to hop about in the open, and “to develop with their bellies on the ground”.
Tjaart says rabbits have the longest digestive tracts of any mammal, which makes it important to treat them in as natural a way as possible.
When the litter is 12 weeks old, the doe is remated. This would not pay at all in a commercial rabbitry, says Tjaart, but they are after quality rather than quantity. They actually prefer to have smaller litters, six or so being the ideal as this gives the mother a better chance to look after the babies. Extra babies are not culled, but put to foster mothers wherever possible.