Heterosis and recipocal effects for growth traits in crosses of New zealand white, Dutch and chinchilla breeds of rabbit.

Records of body weight (BW) and linear body measurement (LBMs), namely body length (BL), body width (bwh), heart girth (hg), height-at withers (HW), shoulder-to-tail drops (ST), ear lenght (EL), head-to-shoulder (HS), lenght of fore limb (LFL), lenght of hind limb (LHL) and head circumference (HC) taken on 72 kits produced through complete dialled crosses were used to estimate heterosis and recipocal effects. The crosses involved New Zealand White (NZW), Dutch (DT) and Cchinchilla (CH) breeds of rabbit. Only NZW x DT and CH x DT crosses showed heterosis for BWs, indicating that non-additive sults for all effects of genes could be important for the LBMs were generally similar. Recipocal effect was not significant (p<0.05) for all traits. suggesting that any of the breeds may be used as sire or dam in planned crossesbreeding programmes.