The diversity of livestock animal breeds is an integral part of global biodiversity and requires careful management for sustainability and future availability. Avoiding inbreeding is a crucial aspect of mating of breeding animals. Our aims were to describe the quality of the pedigree, generation interval, gene origin, inbreeding, and effective population size of Danubia Alba rabbit lines. Line “D” is the maternal, whereas lines “C” and “X” are used as the paternal lines. The pedigree information was followed back from the actual breeding rabbits up to the founder animals. The rabbits having offspring in 2023 were chosen as reference populations for each line. The complete generation equivalent (GenCom) was 17.68 for line “C”, 18.32 for line “D”, and 17.49 for line “X”, respectively. The maximum number of generations (GenMax) was above 30 for each line. The estimated bottleneck effect is mostly the result of selection and not a real genetic loss. The Wright inbreeding coefficient (F_Wright) was the highest for the “X” line rabbits, whereas it was the lowest for the line “D”. Kalinowski’s decomposition of inbreeding showed that it originated mostly from the past; the current fixation of alleles was quite similar for the line “C” and “D”. Based on the predicted effective population sizes, it seems that there is no problem in maintaining of Danubia Alba lines.

The preservation of endangered domestic animal breeds is a specific area of sustainable livestock farming. In the southern part of the Carpathians, a variant of Zaupel-type (Racka) sheep, which was small in size and resistant to the cold mountain weather, developed at the beginning of the 19th century. In order to preserve this historical variant, it was introduced in Hungary in the early 1990s. The aim of this work is to study the pedigree of the repatriated population of the Gyimes Racka to understand its population structure and to support its future breeding work. The pedigree data (2005-2020) show that the number of founding individuals (Nf) was 3,838, within which the number of maternal lineages was 2,255. The effective number of founders (fe) and the effective number of significant ancestors (fa) in the total pedigree population were higher than in the reference population (n=2,591; 67 and 56 vs. 20 and 14, respectively). The pedigree traced back to a maximum of 2.51 generations with an average of 1.34 complete generations and 1.78 equivalent complete generations on average (in the reference population: 6.05, 2.73 and 3.82, respectively). Of the 16,947 animals registered in the herd book (with an average normalised COI of 1.43 % obtained by log transformation), 3,828 were inbred (6.30 %). As regards the maternal generations, it can be observed that the inbred stage increases steadily and significantly from the beginning to the present eighth generation (from 0.00 % to 9.54 %). The average generation interval between breeding animals was 3.29 years (obtained by log transformation). The sire-progeny paths had shorter (2.92-3.02) and the dam-progeny paths had longer (3.62-3.70) intervals. The Gyimes Racka population is already showing signs of genetic narrowing during its short conservation period, which calls for attention to stop undesirable trends.

The aim of this study was to analyse the number of kindlings of Pannon White rabbit does, to get information about the risk factors affecting their reproductive performance success and to evaluate the suitability of this trait as a possible selection criterion. The pedigree information was supplied by the experimental farm of the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences, who is responsible for the maintenance of the Pannon White rabbit breed. Total kindling number of 3371 Pannon White rabbit does born from 2000 up to 2022 were used in the analysis. Year-season and number of kits born alive were considered as fixed time dependent effects in the model and they both were significant (P < 0.001). The genetic variance was estimated to calculate the heritability for longevity. To demonstrate the extent of differences within the population, the ten best and worst bucks were compared based on the estimated risk of culling to check genetic differences. As number of kits born alive increased, the culling risk for this parameter decreased. After adjusting for the fixed effects, the estimated heritability of the total kindling number was h² = 0.14 (s.e. 0.034). The offspring of ten best and ten worst bucks were compared, revealing convincing evidence of principle that selection on this trait has a potential to improve the longevity of the Pannon White rabbits.