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2.1.84A19 - Moffet - Brown/White Cross Female
Crystal Chinchillas Started in 1988 with a pair of pet animals, now we have a herd producing several hundred kits per annum. We first became interested in Chinchillas as we had heard that the animal may be suitable for people who are normally allergic to animal hair. This proved to be the case and our 2 pets were soon joined by another few and then in time had kits themselves.
We quite quickly got involved with the chinchilla scene in the UK and met a lot of nice people. We learnt quite quickly that to be a successful chinchilla breeder we had to have quality animals. We changed from breeding pets to breeding quality stock by purchasing some expensive mutations. This meant we were able to compete in Chinchilla shows and we did quite well in the early years.
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2.1.
84A19 - Moffet - Brown/White Cross Female
It was around this time that we suffered our first setback. The stock that we originally had purchased from a large chin ranch started to become ill. We spent a lot of time talking to the ranch involved and spent a lot of money at the vets. In the end we lost all the original mutation stock with malocclusion.
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2.2.
84B11 - Jessie - Black/White Cross Female
In the UK we have strict quarantine laws, so importing animals is difficult. With a
little luck and a lot of money we were able to import some quality animals from USA and
Canada. For the first time in years the UK was to have some new chinchilla blood. The
first animals we imported were Ebony animals, the UK had just caught up with the rest of
the world as until we imported them there were none available. We were delighted with the
quality of the animals that we had purchased and vowed to never buy animals from British
lines again to use in our breeding programmes.
From then on we imported new lines of animals every 6 months so over a period of time we
were able to replace our entire mutation lines with imported stock.
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2.3.
84B5 - Charlie - CharBlack Male
We had a visitor from Canada a few years ago, he was a chinchilla rancher who had had 600 females in breeding at his height. He stopped with us for a week and educated us in many aspects of chinchilla husbandry. Whilst he had very little knowledge of mutation chinchillas he had a wealth of knowledge of Standard animals. We were only too pleased to show him our "Top Quality British" animals, but were dismayed when he said that our show champion and various other expensive quality animals had very poor density and would do us no good in our future breeding. To say we were devastated was an understatement, not only did we find to our cost that UK mutation chinchillas were poor quality but so too were the Standards. Our friend sent us many nice animals from Canada which fitted into our breeding program beautifully, the improvement in quality was instant. We were very pleased with the way in which our animals were improving and when our Show Champion Black Velvet male turned up we were speechless.
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2.4.
84A1 - Star - Black Velvet Female
During the time of our importation of the foreign animals we started to win more awards at chinchilla shows, in the end we were getting top awards at every show we went to. This started to become a little boring as we had very little competition, we had won everything that we could win, where now ? We decided that we would like to enter the International Chinchilla show, held in Holland. In 1996 we became the first British chinchilla breeders to compete at this show and did quite well. The standard of the animals on show far exceeded the best we had ever seen in the UK. We have now decided that we will no longer show in the UK so that we can concentrate on trying to win next time we go.
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2.5.
84B16 - Lady - Violet Female
We are now proud to announce that we are breeding with Imported stock only. We are breeding Standard (USA/Canadian/Dutch), Beige (USA/Canadian), Ebony (USA/Dutch), White (Dutch), Sapphire (Canadian/Dutch), Violet (USA), Recessive Beige (USA), Black Velvet (Canadian). We also breed various crosses from time to time, such as Tan (USA), Sapphire Velvet (Canadian) and Ultra Violet (USA/Canadian).
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2.6.
84A11 - Minky and kits - Mosaic Female
We hope to import more quality animals into the UK every year so if you are in the UK keep a note of our number. Each animal that has to go through quarantine costs us at least an extra $250 US, so it is quite an achievement that we have imported so many. Please feel free to e-mail me with your questions or just for a chin chat :)
Mike & Anjela Ross
Owner: Chrystal Chinchillas Anjela Ross Lubbeek Belgium Tel : 016 720755 email : dna@skynet.be Web page : http://users.skynet.be.sky89953
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