What I realized is that knitting is similar to rabbit breeding. "What?!" You might think. "How can that be?!"
In knitting, if you make your stitches too loose or too tight you need to toss the whole thing and start over. That's the same thing with rabbits.
If your lines are too loose, no one is related, and everyone is from different backgrounds and different rabbitries, you will get unpredictable outcomes. If you want to be in rabbits in the long run, you will need to toss (sell), the whole thing and start over.
If your lines are too tight, no one isn't related to each other and you start having deformed babies, you'll need to toss the whole thing and start over.
As breeders, we should try for something relatively in the middle. Some rabbits are related, but if our stock starts to get too line- or inbred, we outcross and bring in new stock to get some unrelated animals to breed back to the animals that are related to everyone.
If we start with a bunch of mixed, different lines, we breed daughter to daddy, son to mom, brother to sister - to get better babies and more overall reliable litters.
Line- and inbreeding is something that every breeder does. If your a small rabbitry, like me, once you start keeping rabbits you won't have a choice but to linebreed. Considering I only have one buck, pretty soon he'll have a daughter I need to find a mate for.
I only suggest linebreeding if you breed two high quality rabbits to each other. Related, lesser-quality rabbits will produce lesser-quality babies. Breeding two rabbits of related lines is like "locking" in the genes. Good or bad, the next litter is going to be a semi-copy of the parents.
I haven't linebred before, but I know I will have to do it in the future. Thanks for reading my thoughts and have a nice day!
~Holly