#southern division

[migila]

Season 3 part 2 ending

I think I love it. Need to see the English subs, but very promising so far.

I’ve always loved the scenes of the every day cadet life and wish there’d be more of those flashbacks, so this ending surely gets my approval.

[thefuturefarm]

yesterday i made the 8 hour round trip to A&M Kingsville to buy a trio of composite rabbits!  i’ve been waiting for these guys to go on sale all summer and im excited to finally have them :3

the reason i wanted these rabbits is they were created to be big, well producing meat rabbits, but ALSO they have the genes for every single fur colour that rabbits come in!  so every litter is going to be a rainbow of colour, making for really fun tanning projects.

the top two are does - a chestnut and a black gold steel, and the bottom is the buck, i think a silvered fawn?  or maybe just a very light fawn.  either way, he’s gorgeous, and im DYING to breed them.  the ladies still need some adjusting, but hopefully in a couple days :)

[thefuturefarm]

no kits this time - but she’s still cute!  gonna breed her back to her son on the first and hope for halloween babies!

[thefuturefarm]

harley’s favourite time of day is whenever i have food in my hands ;P

[thefuturefarm]

i was hoping she’d perk up, but max stopped eating two days ago and i was looking very ill and lethargic so i made the decision to put her down.  i’m kinda bummed because it means i’ve lost my two original lop does, but honestly max was on the shortlist for culling anyway because she refused to breed, so i’m not really feeling a loss like i did with chloe.

her guts were just full of air and her caecum was basically nonexistant, despite a very full stomach.  i’m not sure if it was a blockage causing bloat or just ate something weird or what, but i know she wasn’t feeling good and there’s little i could have done to help.  i was suspicious of growth on her ovaries as well, seeing as she’d shown signs of two false pregnancies at random, but i didn’t immediately see anything out of the ordinary, and i was kinda distracted by the bloated guts to check closely.

fortunately juliet is doing well, and i know she’s been bred once (despite losing the litter,) so i feel like she’ll do well as the foundation doe for my cajun heritage lop line, and i will be on the lookout for an additional doe when the show season starts up again.

[thefuturefarm]

a couple weeks ago my KBTatt pen came in and i’ve been practicing quite a bit.  my show breeding rabbits now have their Future Farm code, ready for registration (or for their children’s registration and my organization,) and the new zealand buns have their names put in.  i didn’t NEED to tattoo them, since i’m not going to be showing new zealands or probably not even keeping them once my other rabbits start producing, but i wanted to practice my penmanship.  i made the mistake of using tilly as my first subject - her tattoo came out a bit messy.  i should have used my little lop girl kate, because if it was bad you couldn’t see it, but oh well.  my first one were pretty light so i’ll have to touch them up in a month or so anyway :P

additionally, while i was tattooing charlie, he kicked and i stabbed myself with the needle.  so now i have my first tattoo - a tiny dot on my thumb :P

[thefuturefarm]

apology:  you’re gonna see too much from me until late july because seb is on vacation with no internet access, so it’s just me here for the next 30-ish days.  not much really happens around here when nobody’s about to kindle though so it’s ok.

update:  juliet never kindled more kits, so i took out her nest box and rebred her a couple days later.  well, i say ‘rebred’ but what really happened is she lifted once (for harley) then planted her butt in a corner and growled at him while he tried to woo her again by pulling out all of her hair.  i tried four more times to the same results (with harley and clyde, but i’d rather harley babies,) despite her being so purple it looked painful.  if i were more optimistic, i would think she got pregnant from that one cover, but obviously i don’t have that kind of luck.  i gave her a tag anyway though, because who knows, maybe i’ll wake up and she’ll have pulled fur and my dog will sprout wings and fly.

max never kindled - she gave up on her nest a few days before her due date so i pulled it out.  she is still not receptive to breeding....i’m giving her til fall and then i’m going to buy a new doe at a show and she’ll join chloe on the wall of my office :/  not sure what her deal is, maybe she’s sterile, who knows, but as much as i hate to cull her, i only have so much patience and not enough money to feed a doe that won’t breed.

kiwi, the mama new zealand (creative name, yes,) i was given recently, seems to be pregnant, however.  on one hand i am kind of excited to get a litter from a doe that knows where to put the kits, but she is actually pretty underweight, (i’m guessing the buck was housed with her so they just bred freely, judging from the ages of her current kits.)  i’m giving her nearly free feed and plenty of oats and sunflower seeds, so hopefully she bulks up a little bit before she kindles.  once her current kits are weaned she’ll go in one of the doe cages and i can more consistently measure her food out for her.  if she doesn’t kindle, i’ll give her a break through august and breed her to harley in the fall.  no sense butchering a good breeding doe when right now you just need litters to fill your freezer.

additionally, i had been doing a TON of research last week about rabbit nutrition and feed options - i just couldn’t believe that gray pellets full of soy and fillers and other crappy ingredients were actually good for my rabbits, no matter what the experienced breeders say.  sure, spending $15 on a 50lb bag of feed sounds great, but i would rather my animals be healthy than me save a ton of money.  it’s a good thing i never planned to get rich breeding rabbits, because the feed cost alone will negate it all (but they eat better than me, and if they didn’t, i’d have failed as their caretaker.)

anyway.  the final product of my research is a 19lb flat-rate box of the most  beautiful, sweet smelling, amazing looking rabbit feed i’ve seen - from http://sherwoodpethealth.com.  it’s about the same price as the 25lb bag of oxbow i was buying, but they’ll eat less as it’s formulated for rabbits that eat lots of hay (they also have a more complete diet for rabbits who don’t eat hay.)  the reviews i’ve read are great, it looks great, and the creator of the food has a similar philosophy on pet food as i do, except he is a biologist and had the money to mill his own food, and i don’t.  i’m just transitioning them over now, but i’ve read that the higher quality feed = less urine smell and less nutrients/protein expelled in the urine, which means less flies around, and the flies have been Bad lately (though pine pellets in the trays helps,) so we’ll see in a few weeks if it help.  even if it doesn’t, i know they’re eating good and they’ll taste amazing.

[thefuturefarm]

well i’d been hoping to post a happy ‘hooray i finally got kittens!’ post as juliet’s due date was yesterday...but instead i woke up to two kits on the wire and one dead in the nest :/  i’m guessing she’s a first time mom (i didn’t ask the breeder who gave her to me, like an idiot.)  she made a lovely nest, just forgot to put the babies in it, and the one in the nest was in the front and likely stepped on as it had some signs of injury.

she could possibly still have kits in her as three is kinda small, even for a mini lop, but i’m not terribly optimistic that she’ll put em in the right place.

still waiting on max ...she’s due today/tonight, but i’m less optimistic as she hasn’t been nesting much lately, and she’s also a first-time mom, so mortality is highly likely, if she’s even actually pregnant.

sigh.  whoever is up there giving me the worst luck imaginable with breeding, please stop.  my morale has never been high and this isn’t making it better.