Welcome Home Giant Chins

I feel like I’m playing catch up with the many photos I’ve taken within the last couple weeks. So, you could expect to see a blog post one after the other for the next few days, as I have a lot of photos to share. One of my last posts indicated that we were seeking rabbits. Well, that day has come. We had done a lot of research about rabbits, as we knew we would want to breed them for meat. That may seem like a horrendous act of animal cruelty, but we mean well. We have tried rabbit meat in the past, and like a common response to many unusual cuts of meat, it really does taste just like chicken! We also learned it is more lean and tender, and has a greater amount of health benefits compared to chicken. With the rising prices of food, we have found this to be a great investment towards our food storage, and we can keep the cost of food down in our budget. So, we began looking specifically for meat rabbits. The Flemish Giant was an option at first, but we found out soon after, that they do get a lot bigger than we expected, about twenty plus pounds and they tend to consume a lot of food each day. We then found the Giant Chinchilla Rabbit breed, which seemed more appealing, since they don’t get quite as big and don’t eat as much either. During our online search for a breeder of this specific type, we came across a lady by the name of Susan, who breeds them in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We began emailing back and forth to get some additional information, and she offered to sell us her male rabbit, whose tail was bitten off after birth, for a discounted rate. She also told us of a friend of hers, who also breeds these Giant Chins, and said we could get a female rabbit from her. After discussing it further, we decided to purchase the rabbits. Now, it came time to figure out just how we were going to get them transported from Wyoming to our home town. Susan said she doesn’t ship her rabbits, but agreed to meet us halfway at a rabbit show she was to attend over the weekend in Evanston, Wyoming. That ended up being about a five hour drive for each of us, which was a lot more convenient than a twelve hour drive to Cheyenne. Upon arriving at the rabbit show, our initial meeting of the rabbits was much more than we expected, as the rabbits were twice the size we thought they would be when we picked them up, but they were as cute as ever so we didn’t care. We had already chosen names for the rabbits, since these were going to be our pets that we could love and take care of as any other. The names we chose for them are Salem and Zelda. After getting them all situated in their boxes, we started back down the road for the long trip home. We knew that rabbits didn’t travel well, so we expected them to have a hard time in the car. Salem seemed content the whole way home, but Zelda kept getting out of her box the whole time, while eating the newspaper we had laid in the bottom, and starting chewing on the box corners, ripping pieces of the cardboard. Needleless to say, it was a long trip back, but they are adjusting to their new home quite nicely, and have enjoyed their time spent outside roaming the backyard and hanging out inside the house. We really have enjoyed them, and have started discovering their individual personalities. Zelda is a little frisky, but well-behaved. Salem is a lover, but discontent in his cage, as he loves attention. Here, I have posted a few pictures of our new members of the family.