what would happen if a rabbit got his mother pregnant?

Question

would it cause serious problems or is this a normal thing for breeders to do?

Answer 1

It's a normal thing many rabbit breeders do. Many rabbit breeders will breed a son back to it's mother. It is called line breeding. It's OK to do because the baby only gets half of its genes from its mother. The other half comes from the father. If the mother is a really good show rabbit, many breeders will breed the son back to the mother. This way, the offspring from the mating will have 75% of the genes of the mother. So they should have a good chance of closely resembling their mother.

The thing you want to avoid is breeding full brothers and sisters together that have the same mother and father. Two rabbits that are full brothers and sisters will have almost exactly the same genes. When you cross the two you create a situation where many of the recessive genes can mate up creating abnormalities or traits that haven't been seen for 10-12 generations or more. Normally these recessive traits are expressed as fur coloring or markings that you normally wouldn't see.

Normally there are two complaints that are normally listed when rabbits are bred too closely together for too long. The first is a reduction in size of larger breed rabbits. I'm not so sure that the reduction in size is due to inbreeding so much as it is due to the rabbits selected to keep. Many breeders will tend to keep a good body typed rabbit even though it is small and slowly but surely turn their herd small in the process. The other complaint is usually and increase in the occurences of wolf teeth. This is the trait I would most closely associate with inbreeding.

Answer 2

I breed mother to son and daughter to father all the time it's called line breeding and usually breeders do this to make better show rabbits. There won't be any serious health problems unless you continue to line breed really closely from now on. What i don't recommend is breeding brother to sister as sometimes these babies have birth defect as the parents were to closely related. Good luck.

Answer 3

I don't inbreed this closely, but it won't cause genetic problems. You usually need at least a couple generations of very close inbreeding to see any genetic problems (son/mother, brother/sister).

Most breeders like to linebreed, which is using rabbits with similar ancestry but not so closely related, such as half-siblings, uncle/niece, cousins, etc. This is how we cement good traits and produce a consistent line of show rabbits.

Answer 4

There are no consequences to animal incest in the short term. In breeding is sometimes done to keep the line pure. However, more often than not with rabbits it's a matter of not separating the bucks from the does soon enough.

Answer 5

I don't know about breeders, but it sometimes happens in the wild. What happens is you get lots of little rabbits.
Now, over time, close crossing of relatives leads to all kinds of health problems.

Answer 6

She'd have baby rabbits, of course. lol! Any recessive traits that the mother passed on to the son would show up in about 50% of the babies. This is why repeated inbreeding produces a higher rate of genetic deformities and disease.

Answer 7

Things like that happen all the time. As a result animals like rabbits can become severely inbred, but I think, as they are a different species as us, that there aren't as many side effects.

Answer 8

In the wild they may do this but the babies might be born with defiencies and be disabled, this is unfair on the babies.
Also, it wouldn't and shouldn't happen in human life. However if you have the mother and son in a cage and they mate, they are just doing what they would do in the wild.

Answer 9

well this is what we call incest. deformities probably will occur from their genetics being way more than too close. it is NOT a normal thing for breeders to do, incest in any animal can cause major health, genetic, and mental problems for them.

Answer 10

Thats normal if its in Wisconsin.