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Post by runningdog on Jan 20, 2018 16:29:13 GMT -5
Oh well. The little dark grey one didn’t make it.
Ce la vie, ce la morte. Rabbit fluff for Angus and the girls tonight.
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Post by Sherry on Jan 22, 2018 9:01:02 GMT -5
I'm sorry to hear that But yes, fuzz would enjoy themselves.
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Post by runningdog on Jan 26, 2018 9:09:22 GMT -5
Angus and the girls have been doing sterling duty as receivers of fallen stock. The harlequin with the dark ears and the light grey both keeled over on me, too. Still 4 little rabbits left - the light-eared harlie and the bigger black are growing away nicely, well up towards 170g each now, though the smaller black and the magpie seem to have got stuck around 120g. They’re nibbling a mush made of rabbit pellets soaked in water as well as hay, and I spend five minutes or so after each meal (down to every 4 hours now) sitting brushing their fur with a soft toothbrush to try and get the knots out - they’ve splashed so much milk around at mealtimes that they’ve all got knots. We’re making slow progress but we’ll get there eventually. At the very worst, they’ll moult into adult coats at 5-6 months old! In the meantime they enjoy scampering around the floor a bit, then come back, scramble up and sit on me to be groomed and snuggle before they go back to the cage. They still have the heater but I’ve got its legs on the highest level now to start weaning them gently off the additional heat. Doesn’t stop them jumping up to sit on top of it so this morning I put toilet roll inners around the flex before they start chewing it. Rabbits love chewing electric cables - I had one years ago who carefully removed all the insulation off the mains lead for the TV and then sat and watched as I found out the hard way by running my hand along the cable. I hate 240V AC..... I need to do some serious rearranging in my bedroom, though. Ivy is determined to get onto the windowledge, which is barely wide enough for a ferret to walk on and just barely within her jump-up-and-grab range, so of course she falls off quite a bit. I need to either shift the dressing table out so she can’t jump up at all, or maybe put in something she can use as an intermediate step and stretch a piece of cloth right across the width of the window bay so she has a soft landing place as she slides off yet again!
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Post by runningdog on Jan 27, 2018 18:10:34 GMT -5
Compromise on the bedroom windowledge - I made a clean sweep of anything Ivy could knock off it (everything.... isn’t it amazing the stuff that migrates onto windowledges?) then put down a load of blankets for her to fall onto. She’s got bored now there’s no damage to do! Holly’s moulting - she’s normally not a come-and-caress-me sort of ferret - more the sort who rampages all over you like you’re a jungle gym - but tonight she wanted to lie in my lap and have her scruff and back scratched non-stop for five minutes. If I stopped scratching, she rolled all over my fingers until I got the message. Angus electrocuted me with his whiskers several times by tunneling under the synthetic fleece blankets and then coming to ‘earth’ himself on my fingers - he was having a wonderful game with Holly that involved them running furiously around under the blanket and then catching each other to wrestle, with pauses while one came out and jumped all over the other under the blanket. Eventually Angus got so excited and leapt so wildly around that he fell off the bed. They had another rabbit fluff today - the little magpie kit was stiff this morning. Only three left now, but they’re all growing rapidly today so fingers crossed yet again.
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Post by runningdog on Jan 29, 2018 16:20:20 GMT -5
Yay, no rabbit fluffs for the ferrets today! They had the smaller black fluff yesterday, leaving just two surviving orphan bunnies. Today both survivors looked healthy and full of energy - long may it continue! They’re growing well at last, putting on about 10g a day now and scoffing plenty of hay and a few rabbit feed pellets.
They’ll be 4 weeks old tomorrow - next milestone is them weaning themselves off the milk....
I gave the ferrets mice for breakfast today. Holly and Ivy grabbed theirs and scampered off, Angus was fast asleep in the nest. I stroked him a bit and he half-woke-up, then I dangled a mouse over his nose and - still without opening his eyes properly - he opened his mouth and took it, then simply lowered his head. Since he was close to the edge of the nest that meant his head and neck dangled right down..... it looked for a few seconds like a dead mouse was about to pull him head-first out of the nest! About then he suddenly woke up properly and was out of nest, on his paws and crunching busily, all in one move.
Wish I’d had the phone with me and recorded that!
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Post by Sherry on Jan 30, 2018 7:27:00 GMT -5
Sorry you've lost most of the bunnies, and fingers crossed the remaining two thrive now. Angus is a funny character lol
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Post by runningdog on Jan 30, 2018 20:07:47 GMT -5
They absolutely creased me up tonight. I have a synthetic-fibre blanket on my bed, which they like to burrow under. When they do, of course, they get a static build-up on their coats which, if I remember my secondary school physics correctly, is naturally more intense on the pointiest bit. That’s a nose, of course. Normally the one that’s just come to touch my fingers. Tonight Angus got his come-uppance. Ivy was tunneling away happily under the blanket when Angus started jumping up and down on top of her. A few joyous pounces later, a small pointy nose came out from under the blanket and goosed him with a spark before ducking back out of sight. My, did Angus jump!
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Post by Sherry on Jan 31, 2018 7:23:13 GMT -5
Oh but to have had video cam in hand for that one lol
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Post by runningdog on Feb 7, 2018 5:23:33 GMT -5
Some animals seem to just naturally lend themselves to being cute and photogenic. Or maybe they’re just posers. Angus is definitely one of them! Two pix, a second or two apart, and he was fast asleep for both! The two surviving baby bunnies are now looking fairly securely alive and healthy, so they have names now - Tiger and Raven. They still think I’m their mum and run to me every time they see me, wanting cuddles (which, yes, they get....spoilt little darlings!) and I’m going to keep them both, of course, rather than put them in the freezer at 6 months like most of the young bunnies (there’s 6 out in the shed getting very close to freezer camp now... two more off to new homes as breeders next month). Here’s Tiger, looking all fluffy and cute.
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Post by Sherry on Feb 7, 2018 7:17:27 GMT -5
Love watching the weird position ferrets get into while sleeping! And the buns would be adorable to watch I don't think I could give them up either.
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Post by runningdog on Feb 8, 2018 8:27:23 GMT -5
Sitting downstairs this morning talking with the dog (one of my bitches was spayed yesterday so she’s getting even more coddling than usual) and there was a scratch on the kitchen door. Went to look and there was Angus, wanting to come join us! I picked him up, wondering how on earth he’d got out of the cage and where on earth the other two might have got to, and carried him back upstairs. One of the top doors of the cage was open. I’d handed Angus a chick through that door for breakfast so I can only assume I didn’t latch it properly afterwards. I popped him back in (to his disgust) and made sure it was properly closed, then started looking and calling for the girls. Holly popped out of the laundry basket with a ‘you rang??’ sort of expression, so I scooped her up and put her home safely. Ivy was next door in my daughter’s room, poking through Michelle’s belongings. I won’t tell Michelle - she doesn’t approve of critters rummaging in her stuff! She’s away at university until Easter so she’ll never know. The look on Ivy’s face was more ‘But I haven’t finished looking yet-!’ as I picked her up. All safely incarcerated again and I’ll have to make sure I double-check the doors are properly latched in future.
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Post by Sherry on Feb 8, 2018 10:24:11 GMT -5
Thankfully Angus came right down! One night about 2am, I wake to the feeling of a little ferret scratching at my arm. It was Sinnead, and thank the gods she came upstairs immediately(their cage was in the living room) as the 2 boys were standing at the open basement door, almost daring one another to go down into the unfinished basement. After gathering them up and putting them back in, we found out how they got out. Sinnead immediately stood up against the gate and started bouncing against it, popping it right back open lol. We had to use a butterfly clip to keep them closed until we could get a ferret nation. At that time we had this cage
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Post by runningdog on Feb 8, 2018 10:43:07 GMT -5
They are ingenious little devils, and far too quick to learn to exploit any weakness they find in a cage, aren’t they? Holly was letting herself out of the other cage practically every time I turned my back until I tied the gates shut with string - same sort of doors as on that cage in your picture. Now they’re in the Ferret Nation I can’t imagine how they’d manage to open a properly-shut door so it must have been my fault this time.
[Used to have a cage just like that for pet rats, years ago. I think the wire eventually gave out but the big plastic base is still around. When I build the outdoor ferrets a new ferret court this spring, I have plans for it.]
I don’t know how long they’d been out - I thought at first Angus had come straight down but now I think maybe they’d been out a while, because when I let them out for their normal afternoon play session just now, they just had a spot of salmon oil each and vanished into the chest of drawers to sleep, instead of the usual mad explosion of ferrets playing all over. Even Angus barely had a bounce in him and Ivy wasn’t going to get out of bed to begin with until I showed her the oil!
Thankfully we’ve had house-critters of so many species of the years, it’s second nature to proof everywhere against everything..... cross fingers....
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Post by Sherry on Feb 8, 2018 10:44:51 GMT -5
Heather 's hybrid girls figured out how to open a ferret nation lol. So did her minky. It all depended on bouncing down the floors in the right order and banging against the doors at the right time
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Post by Heather on Feb 8, 2018 22:09:21 GMT -5
Bah, the poley girls have to work together to get the cage open, that rotten minky figured out how to use her wee paws to push the buttons in the right directions. I then put secondary locks on which the naughty wee creature figured out how to work the hooks. I think we've got her now lol ciao
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