Welcome to Furrytails

Thought I'de make an english blog about Furrytails.
I'm breeding chinchillas. Actually both me and my boyfriend breed them, but mostly me :)

At this point we only have one breeding pair.
The male of our first pair passed away a few weeks back.

Our breeding pair contains Turbo Chins Christian. An all black ebony male:

And Furrytails' Nebri (we call her MiniPiv on a daily basis) A Pink White poss. TOV female:


The 9. august 2009 Mini and Christian got a beautiful little Pink White Ebony girl. Furrytails' Madonna.
At first the plan was to sell this little girl, but there's just something about her. So we are going to keep her :)
The plan is to find a light grey, homo chocolate ebony (or dark tan homo), homo brown velvet or a homo TOV chocolate male for her.

And the we have the other animals :)
Furrytails' GalaThea and Furrytails's Fnug.
They are from our first litter, and they are sisters.It's Thea at the top, and Fnug at the bottom.
There's something wrong with Fnug. We are not quite sure what. She was very small when she was born, and she's always been kinda weird compared to other chinchillas.
Some times i fear she's dead, because she dosen't wake up when we touch her. We need to pick her up, before she reacts. Then she gets all confused, and just want to go back into her cage ^_^
She also have some other weird things she do. And she's a furbiter. I don't know why or when it started.
Thea, on the other hand, is a strong willed chinchilla. She wants to fight all the other chins if given the chance, but she's very kind to Fnug.

Then we have Mini, Fnug and Theas mum, Silver Streak's Mystique

She's a silver mosaic poss. ebony.

The last animal we have is Toby.
He's a beautiful light grey male. At the moment he lives with one of my friends, but I'm going to get him home soon - I hope ;)
He dosen't have a pedegree so we are not going to breed him. And he's also too big in our opinion.

And then a bit about why and how we breed :)
I got my first chin back in 1997. He died about 14 days ago.
But in 2004 I got Mystique, and her and Bisse became a pair.
In 2005 they got their first litter (Fnug and Thea), and we officially started breeding.
We didn't care much for the thendensy in chinchilla breeding, where people wanted "brick" animals. Or as they like to call them - baby faced. And we didn't like how big they were getting either.
We think it's a problem that the animals look so different from the wild chinchilla, because the animals have only been domesticated for a little under 100 years.
The chinchilla shows don't help much. Over here they are judged kinda like fur animals. There is some logic behind why a fur breeder would like an animal that looks like a brick, but now why a pet should look like that.
So we set the goal that we wanted pear shaped animals, between 500 and 700 grams.

We do not think that our way is the only right way. We just think that the chinchilla world needs both types of animals, because only breeding in one direction will result in health problems at one point (just look at very big dog breeds).

Other than that, we try to get as social and healthy animals as possible.
The avrage lifespan of a chinchilla is down to 8-10 years because of inbreeding. Some do get older, but not at many we could hope.

I know that we do things different that some other places in the world, but that's just the way it is over here, and I prefer the way we do things, to a great deal of other ways.
In the end, it must be about doing what's right for the animal and you.