imajpm
Well-known member
This is why I dislike casual rabbit breeders, and why Craigslist should be the last place you buy rabbits if you can help it. Now I have bought some good rabbits from there but there are alot like this one. I've been seeing alot of bad French's in the last few months and every time I see an English being sold with the instructions to groom daily, I cringe.
This is Miss Piggy. She is two years old and retired to garden bunny/pet status. She is one of two angoras I went to look at on Craigslist some time ago. The other I rehomed to a groomer. He had a terrible coat and will live his life out in a puppy cut. They are English/French crosses. Just breeding because you can, can produce rabbits like this. It's especially bad in angora because a poor one is often too much for even an experienced person to handle. The coats of those two breeds are incompatible. One molts, one shears. If you're lucky you get one or the other type, if not you get Miss Piggy and Mr Darling. If your crossing for a reason then you can breed out the undesirable but selling these types is...well, irresponsible.
Miss Piggy has a partially molting coat. It grows in unevenly so her wool is not really very good. She has to be sheared and picked through due to the varying lengths. Miss Piggy has epilepsy and also regularly goes through gut stasis. She is just recovering from another episode of stasis. Two weeks ago she stopped eating and drinking. Three days into it, when nothing was tempting her, I started giving her "candy" just to get some food going through her. She liked that because candy (barley, BOSS, calf mana) is YUM! She was not eating hay, which she loves, but candy did the trick. Three days of candy and she was back on her food and water. If she had not begun eating and drinking then we'd have moved on to syringe feeding/watering.
She is a fantastic mother and loves babies. I discovered the epilepsy during her second litter. She has had one other litter in winter when her stress was the lowest and so it was not noticeable. Heat increases her seizures tremendously, to the point where they occur every day. Sadly for her, she won't ever have another litter. It's too stressful. With her problems, all of her kits were culled, as health is my number one. But she is a wonderful bunny and will stay here until life becomes too much for her.
This is Miss Piggy. She is two years old and retired to garden bunny/pet status. She is one of two angoras I went to look at on Craigslist some time ago. The other I rehomed to a groomer. He had a terrible coat and will live his life out in a puppy cut. They are English/French crosses. Just breeding because you can, can produce rabbits like this. It's especially bad in angora because a poor one is often too much for even an experienced person to handle. The coats of those two breeds are incompatible. One molts, one shears. If you're lucky you get one or the other type, if not you get Miss Piggy and Mr Darling. If your crossing for a reason then you can breed out the undesirable but selling these types is...well, irresponsible.
Miss Piggy has a partially molting coat. It grows in unevenly so her wool is not really very good. She has to be sheared and picked through due to the varying lengths. Miss Piggy has epilepsy and also regularly goes through gut stasis. She is just recovering from another episode of stasis. Two weeks ago she stopped eating and drinking. Three days into it, when nothing was tempting her, I started giving her "candy" just to get some food going through her. She liked that because candy (barley, BOSS, calf mana) is YUM! She was not eating hay, which she loves, but candy did the trick. Three days of candy and she was back on her food and water. If she had not begun eating and drinking then we'd have moved on to syringe feeding/watering.
She is a fantastic mother and loves babies. I discovered the epilepsy during her second litter. She has had one other litter in winter when her stress was the lowest and so it was not noticeable. Heat increases her seizures tremendously, to the point where they occur every day. Sadly for her, she won't ever have another litter. It's too stressful. With her problems, all of her kits were culled, as health is my number one. But she is a wonderful bunny and will stay here until life becomes too much for her.
