Enhancing the sustainability of rabbit production from the perspective of animal genetics

The concept of sustainability, originating from the late 1980s, emphasises the ability to maintain processes over time without compromising future generations’ needs. It encompasses social, environmental and economic dimensions, although controversies persist regarding the latter’s inclusion. In the case of rabbit production, the economic dimension is paramount to ensure the future sustainability of the sector, given the large number of threats, mainly economic, it is facing. The major challenge when considering social and environmental sustainability plans in breeding programmes is how to properly include these dimensions in the functions defining the relevance of the different traits to be considered during the development of specialised lines. Note however that the key drivers of the current economic sustainability of the sector: prolificacy, feed efficiency and some functional traits such as resilience and survivability, are also the most likely levers of the environmental and social components of sustainability. In this context, the development of specialised lines is the most valuable contribution to sustainability by animal geneticists, the maternal lines specialised in producing large amounts of healthy weaned kits and the terminal sire lines specialised in efficiently transforming feed into meat. Regarding feed efficiency, important milestones have been achieved in recent years, many of them related to the fact that kits are raised in collective cages, and under these rearing conditions, tools have been developed to measure feed intake at the individual level, as well as to explore the role that one individual imposes on their cage-mates. Despite the fact that genomic tools have been developed and used to explore the role of genomic regions of different traits of interest, this information is still far from being used in applied breeding programmes. In the near future, we could predict that breeding programmes for enhanced sustainability will still mainly rely on pedigree records and phenotypic information for prolificacy and feed efficiency; but enriching the list of available phenotypes with additional traits, most likely obtained under automatic recording systems, to explicitly account for the social and environmental sustainability plans. In this framework, omic tools will perform a valuable role for further investigation of the biological basis controlling the major drivers of rabbit production sustainability, and hopefully in the future this information could be directly incorporated into breeding programmes.