Well Tarax Stud has been very steady in the in the last 2 months with visitors, bunnies and the goats :) and to be honest we love it lol....whether the rest of the family love the fact they can never come and just visit without interruptions is another matter lol anyway we digress :) well June was an interesting month as we had a surprise where rabbit showing is concerned. To understand what i'm talking about we need to go back a few years when Kim saw her first chocolate tortoiseshell mini lop at a friends house. Nigel and Sue Shipham creators of Ibreed and Ishow had one in their shed and Kim fell in love with the colour :)
( one of Stephanie Chambers Choc tort bucks)
Well in a joint partnership with Lea Fletcher the colour became standardised in 2006. Now this is where the problem starts lol...because of the chocolate gene lilac tortoiseshell would pop up as well but because it was not a recognised colour that had gone through the breed standards process, the colour was not shown then recently i was going through the colour breed standards book and came across something by chance (looking up choc agouti's and blue agouti's....sorry another story)...now in the mini lop standards any colour can be shown as long as its a recognised colour in the BRC standards even if another breed....so where is he going with this i hear you cry...well hang on i'm getting there...on page 28 of the colour breeds standard i spotted 'tortoiseshell aa B.C.ee also in brown (bb), blue (dd) and.....wait for it...lilac (bb dd) :) so the colour has been recognised all this time! which caused quite a few smiles and cheers from the mini lop fraternity
Our other changes is that we have been trying to source a decent pet hutch builder so that we can forward our customers on to someone who can build quality hutches. We eventually found someone through one of our other visitors who is called 'The Hutch Man' and has been able to supply us with very good heavy duty hutches starting from 3 foot up to 8 foot :)
The outsides have a tiger effect done to the wood and can be done with various colour preservative finishes
We also ordered some collapsible runs from him for our borders (and our own lol) they come as 6x2x2 foot and 8x3x2 foot which are brilliant for children getting into to have time with their pets :)
There I've done my salesman bit lol i can deliver locally anything upto 5ft in length but Scott who builds them can deliver anything larger :)
(One of Steph's Lilac Torts)
As you can see its a beautiful colour so now breeders can show them as the colour they are meant to be :) the other plus is that hopefully it will stop people calling them Sussex Golds and Sussex Creme's which are breeds not colours! Anyway that was a plus as its a colour Kim has missed having in the shed so now when they pop up we can think about keeping them.
Well our next bit of news in the shed is another...new colour :) though to be honest its not exactly a new colour for us but it is in the mini lop for us...and that is the BEW or blue eyed white. Now our good friend and mentor Daren Morris has had this particular colour for a while now and Kim finally relented asking Daren to help us out with some stock so say hello to Hugo....
Now obviously we needed a doe to help start us off...and if you know Daren...and Kim lol...we ended up with 2 :) Tanti is a BEW daughter of Hugo's whilst Geisha is a dutch split.
Both are lovely doe's...just waiting for them to get themselves mated up now which is frustrating the hell out of Hugo lol
as both girls just lay flat or play possum lol.
Our other addition was a lovely little super steel doe who we named Lady S :) she is such a friendly doe
and we thought brilliant as she can help with our Lutino programme :) and then kim turned her over to check if she was ready to start mating....and we have now renamed her to....'Lord S' (grin) as she turned out to be a he lol not that it has caused us any problems as he is still going to be use full within the Lutino prog.
Our other changes is that we have been trying to source a decent pet hutch builder so that we can forward our customers on to someone who can build quality hutches. We eventually found someone through one of our other visitors who is called 'The Hutch Man' and has been able to supply us with very good heavy duty hutches starting from 3 foot up to 8 foot :)
There I've done my salesman bit lol i can deliver locally anything upto 5ft in length but Scott who builds them can deliver anything larger :)
Stock wise in the shed we have a few litters now at 4 weeks (just counted...25!) 7/8 we will be running on 6 are already reserved so there will be a few more looking for homes by mid August :) my favourites at the moment have to be my lilac Siberians which i have been waiting a while for :)
The other litters which we have been waiting for is in our Lutino programme; Agret our Lutino doe was mated to Sinclair our choc tort buck this produced 2 blacks and 4 sooty's and to be honest its still early to assess them. Our other doe mated up was our Black self doe from Denmark which carries the pp gene....she was mated up to Baal one of our Lutino bucks...this pairing produced 3 blacks, 1 sooty and our first Lutino
not sure what the sex on this one is...but who cares lol its a lovely little thing, we are hoping for some more stock coming over from Denmark in the near future as Marianne has offered us 2 lutino's which have already journeyed the first leg to getting over here :) fingers crossed it will be soon lol.
The only other thing of note is we have even more additions to Tarax Stud but they are not rabbits lol...there something Kim and myself have commented b4 about and then after the London show we decided to go ahead and get them...we had to sort the garden out first....then build a new shed just for them
And here are our new additions to the family :) 2 African Pygmy Goats Petal (left) and Pansy (right)
Wonderful characters and have brilliant personalities lol....once the goat playground was built there a never ending source of entertainment...
especially for the dogs who get frustrated that they cant play with them....lol
So thats it for the moment :) we still have lots to add especially with our boarding side but i will leave that to chat about next time, so until then enjoy the summer and speak to all later :)
