Small'n'furry
Jun. 19th, 2007 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mad_andyWell.
Been a lot happening since I last updated. Most of it animal related. So are you sitting comfortably?
Then we shall begin... with a visit to Aladdin's cave...
Last Friday I went to a place called Simon's Rodents with Chris. This is one of our suppliers; he supplies both frozen reptile/raptor food, and exotic small furries for pets. Most of them he breeds at his base in Cambridgeshire, and I must confess I didn't know what to expect; I was more than a little nervous, because if the husbandry was crap and the condition of the beasties awful I didn't know what I was going to do.
I needn't have worried, which was nice. It was very businesslike, so the animals were kept in easy to clean containers - no rotastaks or palatial, hard to clean cages! - but everything was plump and bright eyed, well fed and watered, breeding like billyo and curious when you peeped in the top.
Most of all, it didn't smell. Well, it did, but not bad; it smelt of fresh hay and shavings, not urine and ammonia and musk. You can't have that many animals in close proximity and not have a certain amount of whiffiness! What I'm trying to say is that we visited in the middle of a working day and everything is routinely clean and well looked after.
But oh, the list of species was enough to make your mouth water and your wallet screech!
Simon himself was very pleasant, and kept apologising for the mess; all things considered it was spick and span, which we kept telling him! No muck piles, no rotting heaps of yuck in the corners... but I digress.
He took us into one area that held gerbils, rats, spiny mice, jirds, jerboas, striped mice, fat tailed gerbils abd degus. OMG. I have a distinct soft spot for gerbils; I used to breed them when I was a kid, and considering that I got my first ones in 1977 (stop snickering at the back) when they were very new on the pet scene and all you could get were wild type the colours at Simon's were a revelation. Black, white, cinnamon, grey, different shades of agouti, black eyed white, pied...you name it, he had it.
I determined that if he didn't have anything else I wanted, then gerbils were my fall back. I love 'em, but I had my eye on other stuff...
Anyway, the tour continued. I asked about a couple of species I was interested in, and we were off to another shed; African pygmy dormice (OMG adorable), harvest mice, African pygmy mice (more on them in a bit), short tailed opossums (I am so having some when I have more space), mediterranean lemmings, steppe lemmings (which i fell for, hard)... christ all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. And on the floor of that shed, tortoises!
Hermanns and Horsfields and leopards, pottering about happily, with a basking lamp and a UV and a big flat pan of clean water. Food of the right kind, all well grown and spectacular animals - the area was impressively clean, too.
On to one of the bigger sheds. Guinea pigs in all the colours of the rainbow, fat and happy, relaxed and unstressed. Hamsters, so many different species and colours it made my head spin. I've never seen such big Syrians, except for show animals; that should say a lot about the husbandry, I think!
Then what was, for me, the highlight of the tour.
Ferrets. Long haired ferrets!!!
See, the Americans on my flist are right now probably going 'yeah? So?' - because they were bred in the States ages ago. But as far as I know, there are very few in the UK - he might even be the only person breeding and supplying them in the country.
OK, I was expecting to see them and sneer at conformation, or health, or something - ferret snob, me? - but I was bowled over by them. They're gorgeous, big healthy kits that when I handled them were active and lively. Good bone, well put together, and totally normal behaviour.
I was in love.
The only thing that made my eyes water a bit was the price - over a hundred quid for a ferret kit is a bit... well, it's an awful lot of money. Bear in mind the most I've ever paid for a ferret is a fiver!
But oh boy, was I tempted....
He had other colours of ferrets - normal short coated ones - and I got to squee and play with those while the staff shook their heads at me and Simon and Chris smiled indulgently.
Ground squirrels. Prairie dogs. Other types of arboreal squirrel - and a long tailed possum. Oooo, he was gorgeous... and three hundred quid!
Back to the office for a cup of tea, and the star of the show - a sub adult female Gambian pouched rat.
Chris and I both got to handle her; she'd been hand reared and was tame, not to mention absolutely adorable. These guys are incredible - and holy crap are they huge. OK, I'm five three, right? Now, when she's fully grown, she'll be able to stand up on her back legs and put her paws on my hip...
Yes, they really are that big!!! Even now she's long enough to have her back paws on one of my shoulders and her front paws on the other while she stuck her nose in my ear and snuffled. Mildly unnerving, because they really are put together like domestic rats - so scale up those teeth, and you can imagine why I stayed very still while she explored!
Fell in love (again). Here you go - this is a Gambian pouched rat, image found by Googling:
Cool, huh?
So...well...Chris and I both put our names down for one... *ahem*
So then, of course, we had to decide what stock we were going to buy!
So what did I come home with, then?
A pair of steppe lemmings, which look like this:
A trio of African pygmy mice, which are something I've been meaning to keep for years. Never found anywhere selling them...until now! They are absolutely beautiful, delicate and holy crap, so tiny:
Mine are young, so they're actually a bit smaller than this.
Oh, and that was going to be it - honest, guv! - and then I remembered to ask about bald mice. I remembered I'd read about them somewhere, but had never seen them; and the baldie rats are nice, so what about the mice?
Off went Simon, and came back with a big breeding tray. Five bald males, and a gang of females; the girls all had fur, but carried the bald gene - so when mated to a bald male would throw a significant number of bald babies.
Well, I couldn't resist, could I?
Soooo Roger was chosen for his ginormous ears - and the fact that due to his size he seemed to be the youngest buck there. And Gertrude stood out because she's a black and tan, another variety of mouse I've admired for years. Beautiful!
Chris picked up some rats and three guinea fowl, and we packed up the car and headed back. Ohhhh, such an awesome place...can't wait for the next visit - although we really ought to take a responsible adult with us next time!
So why, you ask, have I got all these new beasties?
Well, Chris wants to expand the range of exotic small furries he sells in the shop. And getting them from the wholesaler is all very well, but it's an additional step for the animal (extra stress), and it pushes the price up accordingly. So, the two word answer is: breeding stock.
If he's got someone he trusts breeding these animals, then youngsters are coming in ready to be sold that are not only cheaper for the final customer, but whose history is known from the moment they were born. They're guaranteed to have had the very best husbandry, and have only had a short journey to the shop. No being left overnight in a van, or long periods without water - both of which can happen even with the best of intentions.
And whilst the bigger beasties are robust enough to handle it, such a delay for something like the pygmy mice can be fatal.
So I get to keep all sorts of exciting stuff, breed it without having to worry where the babies are going - and if it turns out to be too much work, or I get bored with them (not likely, but you never can tell) then I'll just return them to the shop and they'll go to someone else.
And no, none of them are going to end up as snake food!
They're all settling in well; the lemmings are hilarious, as the male loves to rush about, is into everything, a very friendly chap! He just wants to have fun, eat, and shag - that's it, that's what makes him happy. The female, on the other hand, is far more sensible; still inquisitive and gentle, but she all but rolls her eyes when her mate runs right over the top of her to get at something new - then comes back for a quick shag before rocketing off to get into something else.
I was going to call her Slay and the male Andy. Those of you who know me will be snickering right about now...
However, due to his happy, bright and (let's face it) slightly mental nature, I've decided to call him Kai. And she's known as Dora, for no good reason except that I think it suits her.
Roger and Gertrude are settling in well (especially Roger - once he realised that he was the only male and therefore this female was all his he went into shag-overdrive, which Gertrude is getting really fed up with), and as for the pygmies,well.
They're gorgeous! They're less stressy than I was imagining; they will pop out to see what's happening if they hear any noise, and are inquisitive and calm. As long as you don't try to handle them they're very chilled and happy beasts.
Handling them, however... first you got to catch them, which is possibly the most nerve-wracking experience ever. I let them settle in for a few days, and this morning changed them over to their permanent house; instead of being on shavings they're on chinchilla dust, with their nest box (one of those bird-nest things you can buy) stuffed with hay.
In the end, I had to shoo them into an empty loo roll cardboard inner, and move them like that. They're so tiny and fragile that I'm dreadfully afraid of hurting them - and I'm not even thinking about how the hell I'm going to get any babies out of there!
So what do the cats think?
They now have their own version of cat TV; they sit on the bed and watch the mice potter around the rotastak, the pygmies flit around their tub and cock their ears at the lemmings thumping and squeaking around their house.
All seem happy, and I'm getting the hang of looking after them all; it's nice to have small furries again!
But what of the reptiles, I hear you cry?
Well now. Sam the Bastard has a mate now, a very beautiful Everglades rat snake called Mojo. She's already clutched once this year, and hadn't been fed up to bring her back into condition. She's an absolute delight to handle, calm and sedate; she curls up around your wrist and sits there, unlike StB who flings himself around and tries to rip your nose off.
I provided a moss box in case she dropped any more eggs, so what happened? StB commandeered it, of course. Trying to turf him out of it to feed him was a nightmare, and I ended up with several slashes on my knuckles from his frantic, open mouth strikes.
Bastard.
Once I'd managed to get him out I discovered a lone, infertile ratsnake egg at the bottom of the box; now, he'd either eaten the others and was defending the rest of his dinner, or guarding the clutch (what there was of it) or just being neurotic about getting turfed out of his cosy nest. Mojo lounged under the other hide, and ate anything put in front of her.
Of course, because the yellow peril had been hogging the box she'd been forced to lay four eggs in the substrate - so by the time I found them they were almost dried out. I've got them in the airing cupboard in a nice damp moss box now, and with any luck I got to them in time; they look fertile, and if their dessication was enough to kill them I shall not be the slightest bit amused with Sam. Sodding snake.
Oh, and I managed to persuade Chris to part with Tyson! He now lives with Doris, although I'll be a lot happier once I can get him to eat. he's just shed, and is a very handsome boy indeed.
What else? Ah, just one last thing - I brought my mandarin rat snake home. He's settling in well, has had his first meal. Now all I need to do is find him a mate - and preferably one that's going to cost me less than five hundred notes!!!
So that's the beasties. Today I still have to muck Barclay (now confirmed as female, dammit) out, although she's currently out in the garden. Sulking. Cos she hates it out there. Oh, and do the ferrets and the fishies.
Well, it'll keep me out of trouble, I guess!
Been a lot happening since I last updated. Most of it animal related. So are you sitting comfortably?
Then we shall begin... with a visit to Aladdin's cave...
Last Friday I went to a place called Simon's Rodents with Chris. This is one of our suppliers; he supplies both frozen reptile/raptor food, and exotic small furries for pets. Most of them he breeds at his base in Cambridgeshire, and I must confess I didn't know what to expect; I was more than a little nervous, because if the husbandry was crap and the condition of the beasties awful I didn't know what I was going to do.
I needn't have worried, which was nice. It was very businesslike, so the animals were kept in easy to clean containers - no rotastaks or palatial, hard to clean cages! - but everything was plump and bright eyed, well fed and watered, breeding like billyo and curious when you peeped in the top.
Most of all, it didn't smell. Well, it did, but not bad; it smelt of fresh hay and shavings, not urine and ammonia and musk. You can't have that many animals in close proximity and not have a certain amount of whiffiness! What I'm trying to say is that we visited in the middle of a working day and everything is routinely clean and well looked after.
But oh, the list of species was enough to make your mouth water and your wallet screech!
Simon himself was very pleasant, and kept apologising for the mess; all things considered it was spick and span, which we kept telling him! No muck piles, no rotting heaps of yuck in the corners... but I digress.
He took us into one area that held gerbils, rats, spiny mice, jirds, jerboas, striped mice, fat tailed gerbils abd degus. OMG. I have a distinct soft spot for gerbils; I used to breed them when I was a kid, and considering that I got my first ones in 1977 (stop snickering at the back) when they were very new on the pet scene and all you could get were wild type the colours at Simon's were a revelation. Black, white, cinnamon, grey, different shades of agouti, black eyed white, pied...you name it, he had it.
I determined that if he didn't have anything else I wanted, then gerbils were my fall back. I love 'em, but I had my eye on other stuff...
Anyway, the tour continued. I asked about a couple of species I was interested in, and we were off to another shed; African pygmy dormice (OMG adorable), harvest mice, African pygmy mice (more on them in a bit), short tailed opossums (I am so having some when I have more space), mediterranean lemmings, steppe lemmings (which i fell for, hard)... christ all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff. And on the floor of that shed, tortoises!
Hermanns and Horsfields and leopards, pottering about happily, with a basking lamp and a UV and a big flat pan of clean water. Food of the right kind, all well grown and spectacular animals - the area was impressively clean, too.
On to one of the bigger sheds. Guinea pigs in all the colours of the rainbow, fat and happy, relaxed and unstressed. Hamsters, so many different species and colours it made my head spin. I've never seen such big Syrians, except for show animals; that should say a lot about the husbandry, I think!
Then what was, for me, the highlight of the tour.
Ferrets. Long haired ferrets!!!
See, the Americans on my flist are right now probably going 'yeah? So?' - because they were bred in the States ages ago. But as far as I know, there are very few in the UK - he might even be the only person breeding and supplying them in the country.
OK, I was expecting to see them and sneer at conformation, or health, or something - ferret snob, me? - but I was bowled over by them. They're gorgeous, big healthy kits that when I handled them were active and lively. Good bone, well put together, and totally normal behaviour.
I was in love.
The only thing that made my eyes water a bit was the price - over a hundred quid for a ferret kit is a bit... well, it's an awful lot of money. Bear in mind the most I've ever paid for a ferret is a fiver!
But oh boy, was I tempted....
He had other colours of ferrets - normal short coated ones - and I got to squee and play with those while the staff shook their heads at me and Simon and Chris smiled indulgently.
Ground squirrels. Prairie dogs. Other types of arboreal squirrel - and a long tailed possum. Oooo, he was gorgeous... and three hundred quid!
Back to the office for a cup of tea, and the star of the show - a sub adult female Gambian pouched rat.
Chris and I both got to handle her; she'd been hand reared and was tame, not to mention absolutely adorable. These guys are incredible - and holy crap are they huge. OK, I'm five three, right? Now, when she's fully grown, she'll be able to stand up on her back legs and put her paws on my hip...
Yes, they really are that big!!! Even now she's long enough to have her back paws on one of my shoulders and her front paws on the other while she stuck her nose in my ear and snuffled. Mildly unnerving, because they really are put together like domestic rats - so scale up those teeth, and you can imagine why I stayed very still while she explored!
Fell in love (again). Here you go - this is a Gambian pouched rat, image found by Googling:
Cool, huh?
So...well...Chris and I both put our names down for one... *ahem*
So then, of course, we had to decide what stock we were going to buy!
So what did I come home with, then?
A pair of steppe lemmings, which look like this:
A trio of African pygmy mice, which are something I've been meaning to keep for years. Never found anywhere selling them...until now! They are absolutely beautiful, delicate and holy crap, so tiny:
Mine are young, so they're actually a bit smaller than this.
Oh, and that was going to be it - honest, guv! - and then I remembered to ask about bald mice. I remembered I'd read about them somewhere, but had never seen them; and the baldie rats are nice, so what about the mice?
Off went Simon, and came back with a big breeding tray. Five bald males, and a gang of females; the girls all had fur, but carried the bald gene - so when mated to a bald male would throw a significant number of bald babies.
Well, I couldn't resist, could I?
Soooo Roger was chosen for his ginormous ears - and the fact that due to his size he seemed to be the youngest buck there. And Gertrude stood out because she's a black and tan, another variety of mouse I've admired for years. Beautiful!
Chris picked up some rats and three guinea fowl, and we packed up the car and headed back. Ohhhh, such an awesome place...can't wait for the next visit - although we really ought to take a responsible adult with us next time!
So why, you ask, have I got all these new beasties?
Well, Chris wants to expand the range of exotic small furries he sells in the shop. And getting them from the wholesaler is all very well, but it's an additional step for the animal (extra stress), and it pushes the price up accordingly. So, the two word answer is: breeding stock.
If he's got someone he trusts breeding these animals, then youngsters are coming in ready to be sold that are not only cheaper for the final customer, but whose history is known from the moment they were born. They're guaranteed to have had the very best husbandry, and have only had a short journey to the shop. No being left overnight in a van, or long periods without water - both of which can happen even with the best of intentions.
And whilst the bigger beasties are robust enough to handle it, such a delay for something like the pygmy mice can be fatal.
So I get to keep all sorts of exciting stuff, breed it without having to worry where the babies are going - and if it turns out to be too much work, or I get bored with them (not likely, but you never can tell) then I'll just return them to the shop and they'll go to someone else.
And no, none of them are going to end up as snake food!
They're all settling in well; the lemmings are hilarious, as the male loves to rush about, is into everything, a very friendly chap! He just wants to have fun, eat, and shag - that's it, that's what makes him happy. The female, on the other hand, is far more sensible; still inquisitive and gentle, but she all but rolls her eyes when her mate runs right over the top of her to get at something new - then comes back for a quick shag before rocketing off to get into something else.
I was going to call her Slay and the male Andy. Those of you who know me will be snickering right about now...
However, due to his happy, bright and (let's face it) slightly mental nature, I've decided to call him Kai. And she's known as Dora, for no good reason except that I think it suits her.
Roger and Gertrude are settling in well (especially Roger - once he realised that he was the only male and therefore this female was all his he went into shag-overdrive, which Gertrude is getting really fed up with), and as for the pygmies,well.
They're gorgeous! They're less stressy than I was imagining; they will pop out to see what's happening if they hear any noise, and are inquisitive and calm. As long as you don't try to handle them they're very chilled and happy beasts.
Handling them, however... first you got to catch them, which is possibly the most nerve-wracking experience ever. I let them settle in for a few days, and this morning changed them over to their permanent house; instead of being on shavings they're on chinchilla dust, with their nest box (one of those bird-nest things you can buy) stuffed with hay.
In the end, I had to shoo them into an empty loo roll cardboard inner, and move them like that. They're so tiny and fragile that I'm dreadfully afraid of hurting them - and I'm not even thinking about how the hell I'm going to get any babies out of there!
So what do the cats think?
They now have their own version of cat TV; they sit on the bed and watch the mice potter around the rotastak, the pygmies flit around their tub and cock their ears at the lemmings thumping and squeaking around their house.
All seem happy, and I'm getting the hang of looking after them all; it's nice to have small furries again!
But what of the reptiles, I hear you cry?
Well now. Sam the Bastard has a mate now, a very beautiful Everglades rat snake called Mojo. She's already clutched once this year, and hadn't been fed up to bring her back into condition. She's an absolute delight to handle, calm and sedate; she curls up around your wrist and sits there, unlike StB who flings himself around and tries to rip your nose off.
I provided a moss box in case she dropped any more eggs, so what happened? StB commandeered it, of course. Trying to turf him out of it to feed him was a nightmare, and I ended up with several slashes on my knuckles from his frantic, open mouth strikes.
Bastard.
Once I'd managed to get him out I discovered a lone, infertile ratsnake egg at the bottom of the box; now, he'd either eaten the others and was defending the rest of his dinner, or guarding the clutch (what there was of it) or just being neurotic about getting turfed out of his cosy nest. Mojo lounged under the other hide, and ate anything put in front of her.
Of course, because the yellow peril had been hogging the box she'd been forced to lay four eggs in the substrate - so by the time I found them they were almost dried out. I've got them in the airing cupboard in a nice damp moss box now, and with any luck I got to them in time; they look fertile, and if their dessication was enough to kill them I shall not be the slightest bit amused with Sam. Sodding snake.
Oh, and I managed to persuade Chris to part with Tyson! He now lives with Doris, although I'll be a lot happier once I can get him to eat. he's just shed, and is a very handsome boy indeed.
What else? Ah, just one last thing - I brought my mandarin rat snake home. He's settling in well, has had his first meal. Now all I need to do is find him a mate - and preferably one that's going to cost me less than five hundred notes!!!
So that's the beasties. Today I still have to muck Barclay (now confirmed as female, dammit) out, although she's currently out in the garden. Sulking. Cos she hates it out there. Oh, and do the ferrets and the fishies.
Well, it'll keep me out of trouble, I guess!
