My husband was the one who did most of the research on rabbits before and even after we had gotten our first three. It was his plan that we would also get a Californian or two and crossbreed with the NZWs. However, we just could not find a breeder with Californians anywhere near us. The few that had Californians were not breeding for purebreds but NZW crosses. We wanted purebreds to cross and also to have purebreds now and then.
So, as I got involved with trying to find Californians, I began reading about meat rabbits and somehow came across a few websites that gave information about two other rare heritage breeds that interested me. One was the American and the other the Silver Fox, but it was the latter that really intrigued me because I once lived close to where they were developed in Ohio. Although this breed was on the critical list at one time, it has been moved down to threatened, because its popularity has grown.
Surprisingly, finding a Silver Fox breeder near us was considerably easier than I would have thought possible considering their rarity. At that time, there was a homestead that was raising a variety of heritage animals including Silver Fox just 20 minutes away. So, after two years of having only white rabbits, we picked up a breeding pair of Silver Foxes on a bitter cold day in January of 2014, a blue doe I named Misty Blue and a black buck my husband named Romeo. Suddenly we had colors in our rabbitry!
They, of course, were at that cute 8-weeks age and I was amazed how quickly they calmed down when being held, so different in contrast to our NZWs. I think I fell in love with the breed immediately.
My sweet little Misty Blue turned out to be a very large rabbit that is hard to handle. Misty just turned four years old and is beginning to show her age, but I am hoping to get at least two or three more kindles out of her before summer and then she will be retired. Of all our does, Misty is the most difficult to accept a breeding. She always threw my breeding schedule completely off because it is based on space available for the kits and culling dates. After placing her in with the buck the first time, she may decide to accept a breeding a week later, even if I place her in his cage daily or just one day a week later. This last time I was breeding her with an unproven first timer so I just held her head down gently but firmly so that she would not run around evading and bullying the buck. It worked and she should be three weeks pregnant right now.
Romeo was Misty's half brother and on the smaller side for a buck. All of our rabbits had been really healthy, except for Romeo having a few issues. There were times he had a weepy eye very often and would not eat hay at all sometimes. Then he had ear mites on the same side as he would get the weepy eye. None of our other rabbits got ear mites, just him, and he got them very badly. It was the only time I ever needed to use conventional medicine. Then he did fine for a while and later got them again, same ear. His ear cleared up again and he was good.
We had family issue for the past year and did not give as much attention to the rabbits or breed them, but we did notice that Romeo was not eating suddenly. His teeth were too long. Looking back, we should have retired him right then but I took him to a vet, never having grind down teeth before, and I was charged more than it would have costed to get a rabbit to replace him. (Live and learn.) We could do this procedure ourselves but why would we? The vet told me that he had a bone loss problem and that the one front tooth had turned, so in about three months he was going to have this problem again. We had just lost our only other buck to age, so we hoped we would not be losing this one, but three months later he had the same issue with the teeth and my husband retired him, so I did not get another kindle from him as I hoped.
Then we had no bucks as autumn was approaching and we planned to restart the rabbit breeding!