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 him and me every time I was in the rabbitry. No, he did not spray the shield. He was a precision sharp shooter; he waited for the clear shot.
My side project involving him was being crowded out with successful Silver Fox purebred kindles that looked highly promising, while he was making it easier every day to just let it go. So, the first task on the day we planned to move Misty Blue out of the kindling suite with her LMB-3 kindle and weaned the XCY-3 kindle was to process the chin.
All these years, my husband has always dispatched and butchered. I knew mostly how to do it, but had not much hands on experience. The chin would be perfect for me to start with because I really grew to wanting to get rid of him in the last few weeks. My husband still did the dispatching, but then I did more than half of the processing.
I decided to save his tail. It has a white underside that none of my Silver Foxes tails will have. I wish I had been saving them all along now. This tail is kind of special to me...it is the last of the SF/NZW crossbreds and now we are officially Silver Fox only. I guess it is also kind of a symbol of my rite of passage as I move into processing for myself, but I had got to thinking that it would make a good project to save tails and use them in crafting. I have a hiking-walking stick that seems pretty bare to me. I think leather strapping with rabbit tails on it would look pretty cool.
So it begins, I will collect tails and then we will have many tales of tails!