THE HISTORY OF MINI LOP

The origin of the Mini Lop began in 1972, when Bob Herschbach first saw them at the German National Rabbit Show held in Essen, Germany. These lop rabbits were know as Klein Widder. The Klein Widder was developed out of the German Big Lops and their small Chinchilla. There were two varieties, White and Agouti.The Klein Widder had beautiful heads and good ears, which is typical of German stock. However, their bodies were long and narrow and their weight was over eight and half pounds. Only twenty Klien Widders existed in Germany at this time, with eleven of them entered at this show.
Mr. Herschbach brought a trio, consisting of an Agouti pair and a White doe, home with him to California and set about to produce more "dwarf" lops in other colors. He used a broken French Lop and a Standard Chinchilla in his first breeding. His first litters were all solid colors with the broken colors coming in the second generations. Thus began a long process of select breeding as size reduction takes time and is difficult to control because of the inbreeding.The first Klien Widder developed by Mr. Herschbach were shown at the 1974 American Rabbit Breeders Convention in Ventura, California by Herschbach. He reported they did not create much interest and he concluded that this was because they still were not small enough and their name was not appealing. After the convention, he changed the name of the lops to "Mini Lop" and continued efforts to improve the breed by giving several pairs to other breeders, and by 1977 gave the sponsorship of the Mini Lop to Herb Dyke. In 1978, Herb Dyke and Bob Herschbach started a correspondence club with the first officers being: President-Herb Dyke, Vice President-Craig Carpenter, Secretary/Treasurer-Sherry Rollema, with Bob Herschbach as their advisor. Within a year, they had over 500 members who contacted the ARBA with support for the Mini Lop Rabbit.
The Mini Lop was finally, accepted as a breed at the 1980 ARBA National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was chartered as the Mini Lop Rabbit Club of America, that same year. The membership quickly grew to over a thousand members.In the 1980s, we were breeding 23 kinds of show rabbits including the then new mini-lop breed. We rased 12 Grand Champion bunnies on the show circut in the 80s. In 2006, The Hop-N-Lops Rabbitry was formed when we went from rasing those 23 different breeds of rabbits to just mini-lops and over the past 30 years has sold over 3500 bunnies