Black Beauty's Burrow

09/07/2024

Well, this year has been rough.

We quit breeding the rabbits several months ago besides one or 2 here and there. This is due to us wanting to go ahead and build our new baby cages before breeding again. We weren't getting any little ones anyway so we just quit trying 🤷‍♀️. We could literally count on 2 hands the amount of successful litters we've had this year. That is with us breeding almost 80 rabbits.
This isn't normal for us. We typically have 15 or more litters born at a time. But we were forced to switch feed at a bad time of the year and we struggled with weight and condition for a while. We are now driving 2 hours one way once a month to get a new feed. We saw almost instant improvement. Even when we were mixing it with the old. But we don't feel up to trying to keep up with litters at the moment with all of our projects. Hoping to see litters late this fall.

We are working on new poultry breeding pens, again. And trying to get a new cabinet incubator built since our last one hasn't worked and our Styrofoam ones ended up damaged in the winter. Hopefully we will have the pens built this month or early next 🤞. That would mean we might be able to catch the end of the muscovy breeding season. By next spring, I expect my breeding pens to be completely color seperated and be able to offer rarer colors/breeds of chickens and ducks.

And last but not least..... our goats 😩.
I haven't had great luck with pregnancy on them either. We struggled with weight for a while, and while that is now sorted and should be prevented from being a problem again, it's no longer rut season. All the little ones I had born early this year ended up having a genetic defect since I had bred to my 'favorite' buck. We had seen 2 of his kids who were born last year. They were extremely stunted at 25 and 35 lbs full grown but they had also been starved down to skin and bone 🤷‍♀️. We thought they were stunted by enviroment. After this year, we now know this to be wrong. He will not breed anything again. The young one my grandmother had born on property (not related) and the baby that came out of a bought bred doe are doing just fine and growing correctly. And yes, we had all kinds of disease testing done and opened up one of the little ones.

Anyway, farm life is kicking my butt this year. I'm so ready to see how next year does.

20/06/2024

Why have we been so quiet lately?
Well, honestly we've had a lot going on. One of our biggest achievements that we just got finished is our new goat pasture. Though we still need to get all the houses, feeders, and minerals rearranged.
The young kids we were making fun of in this video are our future breeding boys. The 2 reds are out of registered stock but not registered. The darker one is a moonspot Chamoise that is a registered Nigerian Dwarf: Heaven's Bounty's Elijah.

31/03/2024

Well, today was the day to flip the pens 🙈.
Now all that is left to do for the birds is to separate the chicken sets out. May put some silkies in with my gray muscovy 🤔.

Farm life sure stays busy. But I haven't gotten to go egg hunting yet 😓. My ducks are holding out on me.

30/03/2024

Well, tis the time to pen up the ducks (and geese 🙈).
We've made 3 pens.
1 for our layer ducks which we hope to sell from this year.
1 for our gray muscovy and African gray geese. Though there is a chocolate and a black in there at the moment to even out the pens. Maybe in a day or 2, I will flip the muscovy pens so I can have my colors just how I want.
And the last is for our black/chocolate/blue based birds. Which is where our whites belong since they are likely black underlay.
We have one more African Gray female but she is already setting 🤦‍♀️ so we couldn't pull her.
We've still got to add hay to the houses.
Unfortunately, we lost quite a few males over the winter, which I don't understand where they went, so we are making due with the 3 we have left. 1 black, 1 gray, 1 blue. We never had plans to use this gray but don't have another one at the moment 😕.

11/03/2024

If anyone is interested, we are getting out of Jersey Woolies.
Russellville AR area

This is what we have available:
Windmill's Starlight - 6-2-2021 - Black Otter Doe
BBB's BBM2 - 5-5-2022 - Black Doe

RH Groucho - 4-30-2019 - 3 legs - Broken Black Buck
BBB's BBS1 - 6-23-2022 - Broken Black Otter Buck (Groucho x Starlight)
- Bit of a larger Buck but has thrown some of the best body types we saw when breeding them.
BBB's BBP1 - 2-1-2023 - Broken Black Buck (Groucho x Pointed White)

If all 5 are taken together, we will do a deal.
If interested, PM us. We are motivated to move them.

03/03/2024

Not all was bad though.
We send blood off on 30 goats and we're very pleased with the results.
We also got the first round of CDT shots given to all our adults. And everyone was wormed so we should see good weight gain.
We are getting ready for spring.
Here are some photos of some of our goats enjoying their front pasture pen. This is not all of our breeding stock.
We primarily focus on milk but also like to have goats for brush control.

We also got to learn that Goliath, our fancy buck like silver doe isn't sterile. Unfortunately, the single baby did pass. But that saves us ultrasound money to see if she was a Hermaphrodite and never able to produce 🙈

03/03/2024

This past month has been a very hard month.
On 2-14, we lost our red/white cross milk doe and a doe baby due to a torn uterus. She did manage to have a male and a female. Pictured in the box is Hermes (brown) and Athena (black) the next morning or so. Hermes was the 2nd born and was just too big.
Then on the 16th we had a litter born that had a selenium defiency out of Savanah, our show style unregistered ND doe. We managed to save one buck out of 5 babies. We proceeded to switch minerals to hopefully prevent any further issues.
We also had to pull Artemis from her mother due to a lack of milk. Turns out, she was primarily nursing from Word (our red/white doe), aka her auntie. It's been a hard few weeks for her trying to transition.
We've lost a few rabbits including one of our Belgain Hare bucks. And several litters due to the constant weather change.
And then the latest kick to the gut was walking out on the 29th to find 3 of our goats gone due to a wormer/weather complication. Cinderella - our small gray doe, Candy Cane -our stunted brown pet doe, and our main breeding buck Fudge.

07/02/2024

Yesterday afternoon we welcomed our first official group of kids! And we've got 2 more does extremely close.
While we had to pull triplets from another doe back in late January, we don't own the doe (just manage her) and all the kids ended up passing away.
Meet Artemis and Apollo! Arty is a black female with a bunch of white. Polo is a small black boy with a white poll.
Unfortunately, we did end up losing one boy from this batch.
Currently Polo is having to take turns between being bottle fed and being on momma due to being so small.
These 2 are out of Phrase, one of our black cross bred does, and Fudge, one of our black Nigerian Bucks.

31/01/2024

Take a look at this gorgeous litter we had in our nest boxes this morning!!
We haven't been having very good luck with litters lately so when she started showing off her hay mouth last night, we were giddy! If I had my phone, I would have taken a picture. She was so happy to show it off.
These 6 healthy babies are out of BBB's HeartBreak and BBB's Little Miracle.
To see that there are no REWs in this litter was a nice suprise. There appear to be a few black based bunnies and either a couple blue or lilac based bunnies though I didn't look really close since I was in a hurry.

This litter will likely get to see the show tables if they develop like their mom and dad did. I personally love to show black EAs. Black and Chinchilla are 2 of my favorite colors in EAs.

04/01/2024

Today we had a suprise awaiting us in one of our nest boxes.
All 3 colors of silvers in the same box 😳. Fawn, Brown, and Black. We are crossing our fingers 🤞 that there are no torts but we won't know for a few days.
We expected the chance in the momma, BBH9 out of RRR's Stuart (Brown carrying black) and RRR's Hannah (Brown carrying black and fawn) but had not realized the chance in our buck, BBS4 out of BBB2 (Brown carrying black) and BBB's Baby Girl (Fawn).

Pictured is actually a different litter who needed a bit of warming because the mom failed to have them in her box.
2 big brown babies. Going to watch the line in the middle of the one to make sure it doesn't develop light.
These 2 are from BBL1, who is out of BBB's Little Lady (Brown) and SquareBody Bun's Larry (Brown carrying Black) and BBG8 who is out of BBB's Golden Glory (Fawn) and SquareBody Bun's Larry (Brown carrying Black)

02/01/2024

This year, we have specific goals we want to meet.
* We really want to put our first homegrown Belgain Hares on the table this year. Unfortunately, this is not off to a good start as our orginal doe had a litter of 6 DOAs today 😓.
* We want to continue to see improvement in our Silvers. This year we will still be focusing on body type primarily. We are starting this off strong with 14 does due in 2 days and another 6 due later this month.
* We plan to reestablish the breeding of our English Angora speficially towards show use. This will begin by breeding for better body type. In the last year or 2, we have shown very few EAs and had honestly become disinterested in showing them so we worked on our colors and wool. Well, we finally have our chinchillas. Now it is time to bring them (the chinchillas) up to show standards since they are currently only brood quality. We will also be attempting to show some offspring out of our fancier does.
* By the end of the year, we have plans to have replaced our current baby cages with a new style. This is partially because our main set is wearing out, but also since we have learned so much since we built them and we now need to build them to be able to house the Belgains. . We also have plans to change how we handle growouts and have more individual growout pens for easier growth and less coat damage.
* The last main thing we want to get done is get our website updated and republished.

Enjoy a photo of one our fancy crossbreed roosters. He is a cochin Bantam/Pheonix Bantam Cross.
We don't speak much about our other species on this page, but we have goats, chickens, muscovy ducks, ducks, geese, and donkeys.

01/01/2024

Well, I hope everyone has been having good holidays!
To finish off 2023, we have an announcement post!
First off I want to apologize for any missed messages or any messages that have taken me a while to respond to. I have difficulty around the holidays. Then on the 28th, I sprained my back, somehow, so I've been having some difficulties with getting everything done.
But, certain plans were made before my injury that still needed to be upheld!
I introduce to you our new herd of Belgain Hares 🥳🥳🥳🥳.
We have added 5 does and another buck to bring our total up to 6 does and 2 bucks. All are Rufus except one black tan doe.
I want to give a big thanks to Gene Gillipse who is working with me to make this possible and to my good friend Sherilu Singer who helped me with this unexpected opportunity.
When we were told at the Lonoke show that he was getting out of some of his breeds and his Belgain Hares were one of them, we knew we needed to get them but it took us a while to figure out funds and plans. I can't wait to finally have some Belgains carrying my barn name to put on the show tables. I truly love this Jack Rabbit breed and hope to start showing them alongside my Silvers.
Oh, and in other news, enjoy a photo of Beauty nesting a day on Friday 🤞.
I'll be hoping to find one more buck in 2024 but it will need to wait awhile 😅. The 10 hours worth of driving to get these has me tuckered out 🙈.
Pictures aren't the best since we've been giving the Belgains time to recover from their long trip and life change before we truly mess with them.

27/12/2023

We recieved our official rabbitry registration in the mail today 🥳.
Not quite sure why I waited this long but it's here now. I went ahead and applied for it with my membership refill.

17/12/2023

Yesterday we showed at the Lonoke, AR show.
I wanted to share a short video of one of our rabbits.
Tony Bell judging BBA2 aka BBB's Goliath. SR. Doe

Goliath is a very dark doe and we wanted to hear from a judge what they thought about her color. The lighting in the building really helps to see her color, especially when placed next to a more normal Fawn.

BBB's Goliath (BBB's Gingersnap x BBB's Ear's Boy) is currently bred to BBB's Proven Legacy (BBB's Golden Glory x BBB's Goldfish) and is due on January 3rd, 2024

04/12/2023

And in other news, we have begun breeding after our long summer break and clean out!
First litters of 2024 are due just a few days after the new year.
So far we have bred 14 sets of silvers in all 3 colors (only one cross color set) and we have bred our Belgain Hare pair! Fingers crossed on them 🤞.
This is why I keep more bucks than the average breeder. I want to be able to breed a large amount of bunnies at one time and not stagger them. In our silvers, we used all of our bucks except one that didn't pass inspection and our 3 retiree bucks that we built our herd with.

Here is a couple photos of our favorite pairing that we are very, very excited for.
BBB's Goliath (out of BBB's Gingersnap and BBB's BBL4) and BBB's Proven Legacy (BBB's Golden Glory x BBB's Goldfish).
I can never seem to take pictures that do them justice but I love both of these animals.
We are also doing another BBB's Golden Glory x BBB's Goldfish pairing. This is a brother/sister pairing.

04/12/2023

Here is a short video of Hot Chocolate for those who might want to see one.
We sure had plenty of bells!
Facebook doesn't allow me to post photos and videos in the same post.

04/12/2023

We were in the local parade last night and for his first parade, Hot Chocolate did great!! I'm very proud of my 3 yr old, 34.5 inch Jack.
Didn't attempt to race after other horses. Was very polite.
We did have a couple spooks and a few hesitations but great recovery! He isn't used to all the shadows involved with evening and night time driving. He had never heard police sirens so close either.
Then we took him to the park where there was a Christmas event so kids could pet on him and take pictures with him

28/11/2023

Enjoy a short video of Hot Chocolate, our miniature donkey jack.
We plan to be in the Dover Christmas Parade this weekend if you want to come out and watch!
Yes, the harness isn't fitting quite right. It's been several months since we've worked him in it and it has been adjusted for a larger donkey so we are having to readjust it. It will be correct for the parade. We just needed to test if he was ready for an event.

12/11/2023

Do we have any youth in Arkansas looking to breed and show silvers?
We've got 3 trios, a brown doe, and a black buck. These are from our brood stock so some coats are currently damaged.
These are no charge for youth. If an adult would like them, we are discounting them from our normal rate!
None of these animals are going to place top on the table, several of them due to their age, but would be good to start a breeding program.
The pictures aren't the best. There was some noise and they didn't want to pose today. Come put hands on them!

The fawns have been picked up.
One Brown Trio has been picked up.

Remaining Bunnies:

Trio: BBJ7, BBU3, BBD8

Extra Brown Doe: BBJ2


Black Buck - pending: BBH12 - He shows potentional but I just don't have a need for him.

10/11/2023

Today we took a group of fawn silvers to our friend at Run Rabbit Run Rabbitry.
Since we are unable to attend the Stillwater, OK show on Saturday, our friend will take them on their 2nd leg of the journey. Several of these rabbits will head out to a youth in Kansas who is very eager to get them and has been doing great with the other 2 she has from our lines.
We also finally got our sweepstake awards from our friend 🥳. She picked them up at the ARBA convention for me.
While we love our English Angoras, Silvers are definitely my passion breed. I cant wait to start collecting black sweepstake points in the next year or 2!

Maybe one of these days I'll send off the paperwork on our 2 does who are eligible for GCs 😅. One still needs registered.

11/10/2023

You may have noticed that our website is not able to be accessed.
Don't worry! It's under construction. We will be attempting to maintain it better once we complete it.
For now, enjoy a picture of a Halloween Cat on our farm

02/10/2023

Life stays busy on the farm. Even during the saddest of times.
Eventually we will be updating our website but finding the time to do it is difficult. We have 29 goats on our property now and not a single one is on our website 🙈.

But meet our new Saanen goats!

Kathy, the bigger one is less than a year and a half old and still milking, though we believe her to be drying up. She gave up 3 & 1/4 cup this morning! Maybe it's not a lot but it was my first time sitting down and milking a goat so I'm happy!
Leia is 6-7 months old.
We don't have a buck for them yet but we are hoping to offer goat milk next spring! I have issues with milk myself so maybe this will open doors for me to enjoy milk again.

Also pictured is the rest of my herd (we have 2 herds on the same property) and Mowgli, our biggest ND buck by far! He will be used to cover our brush goats next year and most likely the Saanens this year.

We still have damage left over from the storm that we lost access to due to the weeds. I'll be glad to be able to get our chicken yard cleaned back up with the help of the goats.

01/10/2023

They say bad things come in 3s. I hope this is incorrect because I'm not sure I can handle another bad thing today.
At check in, when we water and feed, etc, we found one of our rabbits had passed on.
BBB's Starry Night, our homegrown chinchilla EA buck passed away. He turned exactly 3.5 yrs old today.
This buck was the last one of our first litter or EAs we raised all those moons ago. I was informed recently that Summer Fun, his brother, had passed away as well.
This boy is behind or related to most of our EAs. Every one of our chins can trace their roots back to him.
I'm very sad to see him go but thankful I have so many of his descendants in my barn. 9 that I know of off the top of my head. I know I'm probably missing several grand kids and maybe one or 2 sons/daughters.

Goodbye Starry Night and Summer Fun. I'm sure you both are binkying up above.

Pictures aren't the greatest but they are the ones I can find easily.

01/10/2023

Today we said goodbye to one of our donkeys.
He passed away due to complications with his gelding procedure that we had done on the 22nd.
Goodbye Marshmallow, you will be missed.

25/09/2023

We no longer raise American Fuzzy Lops.
However, we do still have 2 nice broken black tort bucks that we would like to see go to a program that would benefit from them. They are from Laplops lines and are father (4/2021 - Proven) and son (1/2023 - Unproven)

I will be getting pictures in the next couple days.

Edit: AFLs are now at our friends place. She decided she wanted to try raising them.

25/09/2023

We took Hot Chocolate in a store the other day!
My miniature jack did great!

Meet Hot Choclate. He is so sweet.

15/09/2023

Just a video I took of some of my own goats today.
I've had these 3, and 2 others since Sunday.
I was attempting to get a video of them drinking but I think Momma knew and walked off before the video started 😅. Cindy doesn't produce much milk anyway due to the age of her babies.

Meet Cindy Lou (momma) and her daughters Peppermint (dark pink collar) & Candy Cane (light pink)

In the background you can see Soot & Hot Chocolate.

12/09/2023

We took BIS with our little Fawn silver doe at Pope County Fair today.
BBG10 is out of BBB's Golden Glory and BBB's Goldfish. Her brother (BBG11) took BOSB. The judge really liked both of them. This was a brother/sister pairing in order to attempt to reproduce a GG bunny again since GG's mom retired and her dad passed away.

I also love how many rabbits I can fit in my car! 40 is an extremely easy number. And that is without removing the backseat! I have a feeling that if I had enough carriers, I could get at least half of my barn in my car at one time.

03/09/2023

Life had been busy so we haven't been posting much. But, we have an announcement post!

Meet Soot! He is a 5 yr old gelding donkey. He is unbroken but will be used for riding in the future.
Soot came about because we went to pick up a couple goats.

Which leads us to our other announcement.
Black Beauty's Burrow has teamed up with my grandmother's farm to start raising Nigerian Dwarf goats. We also have a few odds and ends goats either here already or in the works.

So far we have 10 goats.
2 ND bucks - Vance & Asher
2 ND Bucklings - Kiwi & Andy
1 ND Wether - ChaChi (not Pictured)
3 ND does - Julie (Not Pictured), Savanah, & Ally. I don't have a personal picture of them at the moment so I'm using my friend's
2 Small Mix Goats - Word & Phrase

13/08/2023

I have a sad post to make today.

Unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to BBB's Earless Hamster. Those who know me in person probably know her by the name Ears.

Below describes some of her life and her last day. It is not all good.

This sweet girl may not have been great in body type, but she was amazing in attitude and resilience.
From the day she was born things have been trying to kill her. And unfortunately, something finally succeeded.
Ears was born on January 15th, 2021 with 2 littermates. However, within a few hours of birth, her mother had killed one and maimed the other and Ears. Ears was the only one to survive as the other passed away in a foster nest a few days later. Ears was the only surviving baby out of her mother.
Ears wasn't supposed to be kept as a breeder since we are a show orientated barn and she, well, couldnt show. But by the time she was a few weeks old, she had a name and I couldn't bare to part with her.
So Ears became a keeper. She even attended some shows and got to be on the table once. She would hop around the show room on her leash and gain the attention of those around her. These people found her cute and would ask her breed quite often. She ended up making people laugh. This was a great thing since she was part of the Silver breed, which is critically endangered.
Unfortunately, this girl only had 2 litters. In her first litter, once all was said and done, only one survived, BBB's Ear's Boy. When attempting for a 2nd litter, she ended up getting an infection on her jaw. She failed the breeding but the infection became a permanent mass of bone. She was pulled from my showing team to heal.
When bred again many months later, it grew. She had several babies in that batch which we are keeping some of.
But this litter was her last. I retired her from the breeding team permanently in order to prevent further growth of the bone.
Recently I brought her inside to finish her life out as a pampered house bunny and to become a friend to my 10 yr old Black Beauty.
We had plans to bring her back to the show setting this fall because she was doing so well and people missed seeing her.
Then late last night I found her sitting funky. I was planning on catching her anyway becuase she had been throwing her feet all day so I thought maybe she had picked up sore hocks from the flooring. When I caught her up, I quickly realized it was something worse. It appeared to be the start of GI stasis. I spent most of the night with a bad headache trying to keep her alive and bring her out of it. I syringed countless ccs of Critical Care into her along with a few doses of metacam.
She started to do better and drank some water on her own. I left her for a few hours to grab a nap. When I got up, she was weak again. I was able to bring her back up in strength once more. But she crashed again this afternoon. For the last time. I knew she wasn't coming back again.
I said goodbye and left her to pass in peace. She passed in just a few minutes.

I firmly believe her bone growth was a type of cancer. And I believe that ultimately, it's what killed her. Whether or not she truly had a type of stasis I'll never know since she wasn't presenting like a normal rabbit with stasis.

I'll miss this rabbit for the rest of my life. She was one of a kind. There aren't many that earn the privilege of living inside with me since I'm allergic to them but she was one of them.
I'm glad I got to say goodbye but I wish I had more time with her. A little over 2.5 yrs just wasn't enough. Then again, 10 yrs wouldn't have been enough.

Fly free Ears! May we meet again.

Below are some pictures of her over the years. The first 5 were just from the last few days.