Kinetics of genetic progress on growth performance in a synthetic strain of rabbit

Abstract

The objective of this study is to evaluate the growth performances and some genetic parameters of a synthetic rabbit strain over 3 successive generations (G4, G5 & G6), resulted from crossing between the local population and the INRA2666 Strain (France).The results indicated that all the growth indicators (average live weights at birth, weaning and slaughter, average daily gain in pre-weaning and post-weaning) show overall better performance levels than those observed by Several authors for the local population. The crossing thus effectively improved the average daily gain and reduced the slaughter age by two weeks. The study of correlations between growth criteria showed that early selection of weight and average daily gain is effective but that direct selection on average daily gain may also improve the weight by indirect or correlative effect. Finally, the kinetics of genetic progress indicates a fluctuation in genetic progress from one generation to another, which proves that this synthetic strain benefited from the complementarity effect without having undergone a selection on the growthcriteria.