Our Lionheads are the reason Pajarito Rabbitry exists at all, that and my oldest son wanted a 4H project that he could pick up and that couldn't drag him around.
We started with the best lines available, bred, learned and bred some more. Periodically, we bring in a few other lines to try and progress or add that special something to what we currently have. Some crosses worked great, some didn't work at all, but we have learned that sometimes, it takes waiting a generation to really judge the progress of our program. This breed requires an enormous amount of patience.
We breed for over half of the current COD colors in stock as our brood and show rabbits. Our primary colors that we breed for are: Black, Blue, Black Tortoise, Blue Tortoise, Chestnut, Orange, Opal, Ruby Eyed White, Sable Point, Siamese Sable, Smoked Pearl and Chocolate. Sometimes, other colors crop up and we may have some available.
We are just starting to use our Chocolate line to get the Otter varieties ( there will be all 4 varieties of Black, Blue, Chocolate and Lilac eventually), a Chocolate color based Broken line as well as a small number of solid Red Lionheads. Very small quantities of stock in these colors will not be available until late 2012.
We have made huge strides this year and are now starting to do some line breeding to lock in those special traits even more.
We take great care in how we cross our rabbits, looking to both phenotype and genotype to guide us.
