Based on the materials of 23 fur-bearing animal farms of the Russia for different periods of years, a comparative assessment of the reproductive capacity of sable and mink females of standard breeds (wild type) has been carried out. It was established that during intrabreeding differentiation according to the overall color of the hair coat (almost black, black-brown, dark brown and chestnut), the lowest reproduction level is characterized by darker females of sable, which are a significant increase in the number of them, mated with male, but not given offspring (barren females). According to the results of interbreed comparisons of sables and minks, parallelism was found in the variability of the reproductive capacity of females, which is manifested in the fact that, in contrast to relatively light animals, animals that are dark in color are characterized by a greater number of barren females and low fecundity.

On the example of a single population of sables of the Pushkin animal farm (Federal state unitary enterprise “Russkiy Sobol”), the heritability of the general coloring of their hairline was studied. In total, puppies of 1,561 female sables of the black sable breed were analyzed with a total score of 4,794 puppies. Based on the results of the study of various color forms of sables, the heritability coefficients (h2) of the black-brown color form were determined as 0.128; dark brown as 0.108 and chestnut as 0.078, which indicates a high selective sampling for darkening the overall color of the hairline in this population.