Lesson: Ribs

Here I'm going to explain a little bit about ribs. I have two rabbits here. Both broken castors, but they're easy enough to tell apart. The first two pictures are of a younger doe that I just culled yesterday. I stupidly didn't get enough pictures and I'm out of hideous rabbits for the rest of the year now. The last two pictures, second rabbit, is one of my nicest grow outs of the year. He ended up taking third broken junior buck out of 64 at Convention in 2018.

We're focusing not on the entire rabbit, but simply the chest.

In the first picture, you can see that the doe is pulling her head up off the table. She has a high head mount. Mini Rex are to have a very low head mount, where their chins brush the table top. I could 
probably fit a good three fingers in the space between her chin and the rug.

Now, her toes are almost perfectly in the right spots in that first picture. In the second picture, I pulled her head down to the correct mount and held it there to take that picture. Do you see how much nicer 
her type looks from the first picture? It is very, very easy to hide faults with pictures. Her shoulders aren't obviously narrower from her hindquarters, her shoulder isn't even terribly low. But naturally, as soon as you let her go, her head goes right back up like she's offended. She's not offended. She was simply very uncomfortable.

Now compare her to the junior buck, pictured last. I don't need to hold my hand there to keep him in place. Partially because he's a barn favorite and I touch him all the time (but all my rabbits still know how to pose and sit or they don't go home). But the main reason is that he has such a nice front end compared to her.

What is rib spread? What am I talking about? How can rib spread cause a low or high head mount?

Rib spread is the width of the chest through the rib. A narrow chested rabbit will have its feet closely held together compared to a correctly chested rabbit. I, unfortunately, didn't think to take that picture of the doe. But you CAN see how much closer her front leg is to her cheek than the buck. A rabbit can start with a decently wide chest, but never spring, so to speak, off the ribs. A rib cage should widen the farther you move down the rabbit's body. It's what gives the rabbit its width on the front half. An open rib cage such as this allows the rabbit to breathe properly as it sits on the table - thusly, allowing the rabbit a better 
head mount.

A narrow rib spread will cause a narrow and possibly long shoulder. The shoulder blades don't have anything to support themselves without the ribs there, after all. A narrow rib spread will never produce 
a wide rabbit, throwing off the balance.

You want a Mini Rex rabbit to look like a circle from above, more or less. The standard technically calls for a slight taper. This is where the fourth picture comes into play. I guarantee that the first rabbit 
would look nothing like him from above. I just wish I could prove it.

I'd also like to note that you can't have a truly short rabbit with depth on a rabbit that doesn't have a rib spread. If your rabbit is narrow, you are pushing up the rib into the topline to achieve the shape and length of body from the side. So you can either have a short rabbit where the rib is properly aligned, in which case you don't have the depth. Or you have a long rabbit that you're pushing up into a display of 
depth.

I actually didn't think I'd have so much to say on rib spread, and almost feel like I glanced over a couple aspects. These are simply my opinions, as almost all type-related topics are, but they are opinions that I breed for within my rabbitry and typically do quite well on the tables with.