Saturday, November 26, 2011

Getting Over Convention

Well I don't think we've quite gotten over our trip to Convention yet. Wow! Thousands of rabbits trapped in one huge building.
 It was amazing. Though I enjoyed myself, I don't know if I'll do this again. Going to convention is very stressful on the rabbits. I didn't realize how much so. A national breed show would be so much better on them in my opinion. I think our bunnies fared pretty well. We ended up bringing home a total of... wait, I'm not gonna say it out loud. It hurts too much! I did end up getting several new woolies and I am so excited about venturing into this breed. I have 10 woolies total out there and I would love to stick to within 10-20 of these creatures. I would love to duplicate Roger Roth's example of how he maintained his herd. He only kept around 25 animals at a time. And we all know the quality of his Netherland Dwarfs was astounding. (Sigh...) If only we could get down to 25 in each breed. That would be a WONDERFUL feeling. A bag of feed is only lasting for 2 days now. It is time to cut back and cut back again! The lack of successful litters this time around must really be a hidden blessing. We have had so many misses and several dead litters. Very frustrating. We are expecting litters out of our new Holland Lop bucks this week!! I am so excited! And very nervous that we'll end up having misses AGAIN. We have the absolute WORST luck in breeding Hollands.  We picked up 2 bucks from Brocks Fallen EArs and 2 bucks from DTL rabbitry. Very pleased with all of them. Can't wait to see what they produce for us. We will have them working hard for us in both barns!  Also picked up some very nice ND bucks from Lisa Monk. Our old herd buck CM's Northwest(everybody knew him simply as 'HT2' LOL) really made an impression on our herd and we are excited to have CM's Southeast!! Hoping he'll leave a mark like our other man did. Mike also got a REW buck from Lisa. Very nice to be working with REWs again. Still trying for BEWs in the NDs...Very slow go at that. Ton of misses and when we do get that litter it's full of mismarks and either the BEWs are dead or there are none to begin with! How's that for trying to get one particular color??  Crazy. We've been trying for those for almost 7 years now. It's exhausting. Speaking of that,I am pretty exhausted and better head to bed. Got to get up and go to church in the morning! Great start to the day! ;-)