You have no items in your shopping cart.
ABSTRACT
This study was conducted to qualify the morphometric traits of rabbits. Body weight and five morphostructural traits namely body length, heart girth, leg length ear length and tail length of six different breeds of rabbits namely, Angora, Chinchilla, Dutch, Hyla, New Zealand red and New Zealand white were measured. The study aimed at identifying and quantifying some important morphometric traits of rabbits to determine the contribution of each principal component to the total variation in the morphometric traits. The result from the principal components analysis showed that PC1 which represents the body parts(BL, EL, LL, HG and TL) contributed to 82.55% of the total variation, while PC2 which represents the body weight accounted for 9.10% of the total variation. The body weight was found to be highly correlated with all the morphostructural traits with the least yet significant correlation recorded between TL and BW. Highest coefficient of vacation was recorded in body weights whereas between different breeds, the highest variations were recorded between Hyla and New Zealand red. These information can enable rabbit breeders to make informed decisions that will lead to genetic improvement of rabbit.
