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Post by Sherry on Jan 8, 2018 7:50:59 GMT -5
I love reading about your little ones! Such amazing little creatures they are.
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Post by runningdog on Jan 9, 2018 4:36:54 GMT -5
That’s Ivy jill-jabbed this morning. She didn’t bite the vet, although she did let out a very irritated squeak and jumped like mad!
Angus was mounting a vigil for her at the cage door when we got back, though I’m sorry to say his devotion didn’t resist a fresh day-old chick. He stashed his, ran back and grabbed Ivy’s out of her very teeth! Holly had sensibly taken hers into her hammock and kept it secret.
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Post by Sherry on Jan 9, 2018 6:54:27 GMT -5
Too funny. Love is all well and good until food comes on the scene lol
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Post by runningdog on Jan 13, 2018 15:08:28 GMT -5
We’ve been having more fun with food today. I’m always on the lookout for novel food items for them and our local village farm store is now stocking rats. I was a bit taken aback by the size of the beasts - 5 to a pack and the pack weighed 1.7kg! I was expecting smaller rats - I get ‘large mice’ from the same place and those are at best half-grown by my reckoning, not full grown, so I was prepared for half-grown rats. These are definitely full grown rats! Anyway, to cut to the chase, I haven’t tried any of these ferrets on rats before. I don’t feed wild rats to any of my beasts because of the risk of rat poison and I don’t happen to have come across good clean rats to feed to them while I’ve had this lot. I have fed previous ferrets on rats and they loved their ratty dinners, so I was fairly sure the current crop of fuzzies would like rats. On the other hand, Loony’s 5 years old, Joker and Bane are probably 4-ish, even Angus is at least 2-ish and the girls are very nearly 10 months now, with only the 2 golden boys still (just barely) within the ideal 6-months-and-under age range for introducing new food stuffs, so I wasn’t totally sure they’d all pitch straight in. I gave Angus and the girls a rat and they tried to stash it in three different places simultaneously, including under Angus’s favourite sleeping rug, behind the chest of drawers and under the ramp in the cage. I spent the first half an hour of their playtime recapturing the passing rat and putting it back in the cage before it was dragged off across the floor again! In the end they settled down and got stuck in - Angus scoffed a good bellyful of entrails and Holly went for braaaaiiins and scrunched up the skull. That was reassuring because she’s the smallest - if she could bite through the skull, the big boys would be able to. Ivy plunged her nose inside the rat and came out chewing a good hunk of liver. All good. A quick check outside where the 5 boys had 4 rats between them and Loony was contesting ownership of one rat with Bane, Joker and Achilles were gnawing away on opposite ends of another and Ajax, who sometimes strikes me as being a bit ‘special’,* had managed to stash two in an unused nestbox and was crunching the head off one of them cheerfully. All even better! *Ajax is cheerful, curious, lovable and bright but sometimes gives the impression of being away with the fairies, or maybe just exceedingly naive. Achilles, on the other hand, is more of an overly enthusiastic teenage boy - but still very lovable. They are both ditzy blonds, of course!
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Post by Sherry on Jan 14, 2018 11:32:35 GMT -5
I have to admit- I look forward to reading about your little ones adventures!
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Post by runningdog on Jan 14, 2018 14:07:17 GMT -5
I was woken this morning, about five minutes before my alarm went off, by the sound of Angus chewing their rat not a foot from my pillow. There are drawbacks to keeping a cage of ferrets by your bed..... Quite fascinating cleaning up the remains of the rats today - they were all headless empty skins. How the ferrets manage to get the insides outside I’m not quite sure.... stick their noses down the neck and suck, possibly..... This morning’s chicken wings were accepted with a lacksadaisical sort of ‘oh, yeah.... those’ attitude so I gather the rats were a full day’s nosh.
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Post by LindaM on Jan 14, 2018 18:40:03 GMT -5
I have to admit, I have a guilty pleasure of loving to listen to mine when they nosh on bones. It makes me feel melty inside, haha. Maybe it was more of "Oh bugger.. plain old chicken again.. and here we thought we were going to get new special noms!"
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Post by Sherry on Jan 15, 2018 7:42:22 GMT -5
Unreal how they can basically skin an animal from the inside out.
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Post by runningdog on Jan 17, 2018 6:44:07 GMT -5
How to be very popular with fuzzies and have them insist on snuggling all over you. Raise some of these. Holly, Ivy and Angus swarm me whenever I let them out, sniffing every inch of me to find the tasty morsels...... I haven’t told them where the baby bunnies are, but they’re in a room the ferrets and dogs can’t get into, beyond another room they can’t get into.... curiously, the outside boys don’t seem so bothered. Maybe because by the time I’ve carried 5 big ferrets into the house, I mostly smell of ferret! Still got all seven rabbit kits and they’re putting weight on. Fingers crossed......
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Post by Sherry on Jan 17, 2018 9:46:42 GMT -5
Oh they are gorgeous. Good luck with saving the lot. I have to admit- I am really partial to black bunnies
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Post by LindaM on Jan 17, 2018 15:53:28 GMT -5
I saw some baby buns in the farmer's supply store the other day when picking some stuff up. I ended up oggling them for quite a while, while the hubby and an employee we're picking up what we needed.. I came to the conclusion that I may not be the best person to breed big goo-goo eyes and them offer them to my nest of predators.
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Post by runningdog on Jan 17, 2018 17:01:22 GMT -5
These are the second generation of my own breeding of Rex bunnies, descended from my original foundation doe Trudy and buck Tigger. Ghost, their mother, was from Trudy’s second litter, 4 years ago, and originally I sold her to a breeder on the west coast of Scotland, but then bought her back in the following year when I wanted more does and her owner was looking to downsize the rabbitry. My current stud buck, Copper, is a lovely rich harlequin from the south of England but his father was black and there was black in Trudy’s genome, too - she only produced black or albino kits. The blacks are stunning.... but then I like harlies, too. For some reason Copper and Ghost produced greys as well as harlies and blacks - and, gorgeously, magpies. I’m tempted to keep a magpie buck from the last litter - for some reason he’s known as Jack, it just fits somehow - but then I have to find an unrelated doe. As it is I’ve been offered back another doe I bred a couple of years ago - a harlie I sold to a breeder locally who then sold her on to a mutual friend who offered her back to me yesterday when she heard about Ghost.
I rarely sell my bunnies and then only to experienced breeders, and only let them leave home when they’re 4-6 months old. Bunnies in pet shops are usually only 6-8 weeks and far too young; their immune systems can’t stand up to the stresses of new places, new germs, new food and they tend to keel over dead with something within a few weeks of being sold, if not sooner. At 4 months they’re much stronger and have a better chance of survival. Most of them stay with me until they’re 6 months and then go in the freezer - but I know they’ve had the best life I can give them while they’re with me, I kill them humanely and they’re excellent cheap, organic, healthy meat for us, the dogs and the fuzzies.
The kits are still all looking healthy and gaining weight. Fingers still crossed.
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Post by runningdog on Jan 18, 2018 19:06:07 GMT -5
I weighed Angus and the girls tonight, since they haven’t been weighed for a while. Angus is still sitting pretty steady at 1.27kg, which is his normal summer weight. Holly’s at 840g and Ivy’s now down to 850g - so they’ve both dropped back to their summer weights pretty sharply after coming into season. It’s not a problem, since they’re indoors now - they don’t need their flobber to keep warm. I committed a tactical error with them last night - we had a young quail die so I gave the corpse to the three indoor ferrets, thinking they’d have fun with it. They did.... and when I went up to bed, the bird had disappeared but there were feathers everywhere, including on my pillow....
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Post by Sherry on Jan 19, 2018 7:49:01 GMT -5
Sounds about par for the course!
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Post by runningdog on Jan 19, 2018 18:51:11 GMT -5
A little fluffy OT diversion.....
They’re all lapping milk! Badly, in the sense of not being very good at it, but they’re all trying hard and I’m sure they’ll improve soon. That’s not their sleeping cage, that’s a separate one I’ve set up for them to make an unholy mess in at feeding time.
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