We had plans this past weekend to get caught up with things in the rabbitry, but something came up that required us to put it off again. It had been like that for about three weeks, so Independence Day was the day we finally were able to get things done. I discussed my plans in  Thinking Out Summer Culls  about which of my breeding stock would be culled.  I offered Lancelot to a meat breeder who not only thought he was pretty, but loved his temperament.  I tried to offer Comet, because he was so sweet and smaller, but we had only one person who responded and then she did not pursue it. I knew it would be long shot for him.  Misty Blue was too old to offer as a brood doe. Her pelt is huge and the meat will be ground, because it is likely to be tougher. Black Ivy...I just could not in good conscious ever try to offer her to anyone. She just had too poor of a body type with her hips being as they were. Her kits were naturally weaned since we were delaye...

I want and actually need to thin down the herd to make room for the grow outs and to reduce feed costs, so I am going down my list, bucks first and then the does. When we were breeding only for meat, our biggest concern was about health, good mamas, and fast grow outs. We were not interested in showing and Standard of Perfection, but that changed. While we have finally made the transition to Silver Fox only, we have chosen to now work toward show quality, so we need to cull with that in mind. I plan on keeping Canyon's three, two does and one buck, or maybe swap one doe for another. (I have yet to name them.) The Bucks I did an evaluation of my two senior bucks yesterday and it really set in how badly I did need a new buck with show quality type. I am so glad I decided to buy one. I had planned to keep one of the two I had and cull the other, but now I am leaning towards keeping neither one. However, I want to see how their kindles turn out before I make a final deci...

When Misty Blue produced a chinchilla buck, I really loved his fur and was toying with the idea of a side project, even though I knew I really did not have the space to devote to it. Still, I kept the chin instead of culling with the rest of the kindle.  I was not planning to name him, because I was not sure that I would be keeping him, but a name emerged: Chinner, the Chinning Chin. He chinned everything when he saw me, which is a rabbit's way of scent marking. It was cute, until he got just a bit older and his hormones kicked in. Then he began scent marking a different way: spraying pee.  I was his main target. That rabbit was somehow "in love" with me. He had always been the one who came to me first and stayed the longest when I opened the cage door to handle the kindle, but I had not had a rabbit stay so fixated on me as it grew older.  The spraying began to take its toll on my patience with him. I had to constantly be on guard and keep a shield between h...

I confess that I have been rather discouraged this rabbit breeding season, but I finally have the number of Silver Foxes for breeding I wanted and I have hopes with the upcoming breedings as I will have only purebred Silver Fox kits! Yesterday, I thought out what I would like to accomplish with the end of the breeding season fast approaching, because breeding in the heat of summer in the Southeast is not a good idea. Being that I am visual type, I had to make some charts as I thought it all out. My original breeding plans had to change because I bought two Silver Fox does who would need to be added in the rotation.  Then, there is the other problem of space that probably every rabbit breeder understands. Presently, we have eleven cages. Seven years ago, we started with just six cages and that worked well enough with a New Zealand trio and their large kindles that often had to be separated for grow out. Then we added a pair of Silver Foxes and added a couple more cages and ...

I decided to create a page to keep our Cull Records  that can be accessed on the side sliding menu. I wanted to keep all the records together to see the comparisons of live to bone-in dressed weights between the different kindles.  Three rabbits of BGG4 were culled yesterday at 15 weeks old. (One of the four rabbits was passed on to be a brood doe for another breeder when she was 8 weeks old.) The average live weight of the three was 6 lbs. 6.5 oz. and the dressed weight average was 3 lbs. 4.8 oz. so the average percentage of dressed weight to live weight was 51.6%.  These rabbits were NZW/SF 75/25 hybrids on organic pellets without a supplement. This is a starting baseline that sounds reasonable to me. Now I begin working toward my goal of 55% to 60%.  The breedings and age will be watched for best dress weights, but I also am going to be playing with supplementing the rabbits' feed to see if that makes a difference as well.   We end...