A MURDER ON THE FARM

The Tragic Death of Pretty Boy Floyd.

I named him after a gangster of the '20's.  From the monent he grew his first tail feathers Floyd was in constant display. And when you called him a "pretty boy" he would really strut his stuff.

Born June 18, 2011, he was one of the seven turkey chicks I helped from their shells in the incubator.  These were Spanish Black Turkeys that I was hatching for a friend of a friend, and he graciously left me three of them for my troubles.

They became Floyd, Mrs. T and Maude.

Here are Floyd and Mrs. T.
Floyd usually chose to either be alone or with humans when possible.

In fact Floyd was a real people person. I truely believe that he thought he was human.  Whenever we had visitors, Floyd was always right there doing his Floyd thing.  This consisted of him walking around a person in full display and very slowly inching his way closer and closer until he finally touched them with his feathers. Unless they tried to touch him, in which case he moved away and started all over again.  Floyd did NOT like to be touched.  Occaisionally I was able to pet him when he was on his roost for the night, but usually he just moved out of reach.

This year Floyd and the girls supplied us with many eggs to incubate.  Then Maude snuck off one day and started a nest outside.  She hatched 12 chicks and did her best to raise them outside by herself. (This put Mrs. T into brood mode, she immediately built a nest and tried to hatch her own too. However the chickens added to her nest at every opportunity and when the first egg hatched she abandoned the nest. A couple of weeks later she realised she had hatched a chicken and abandoned that too. However she has continued to lay an egg a day for the last 4 months.) Then week by week they dwindled until she only had 9 left. Then disaster struck.  One morning I woke up to find the baby turkeys in the duck pen with the ducks.  No sign of Maude so I went searching for the very protective mom.  I found piles of feathers where the apparent coyote attack happened and a trail of feathers where it dragged her off.  We gathered up the chicks and put them in a cage.  Two were sold along with some of the incubated turkeys to make up our final order.  We must have sold about 60 turkey chicks this year.  The remaining 7 are still here and doing well.

"Pretty Boy" Floyd and one of the young 'uns.

We have been trying to figure out what we were going to do with all of the extra turkeys this winter and Wifey suggested getting rid of Floyd and Mrs. T when we get our last meat turkey butchered.  However such a ruckus was formed by family and friends when this was mentioned that we had to keep them.  So a neighbor will be buying our extras.

Then today another disaster.  About 3:15 this afternoon I was over at my Step-mother's when I recieved a call from Wifey.  Someone had murdered Floyd.

A guy had stopped his SUV on the road by the house, got out of his vehicle and shot Floyd twice in our yard.  By the time Wifey got to the front porch he was dispatching poor Pretty Boy my stomping his head into the ground.  Wifey hollered at him "What the Hell are you doing shooting my animals."  But he just ignored her and picked up Floyd and threw him in the back of his vehicle and sped off down the road.

As soon as I got home we went in search of the vehicle at the local DNR parking lots but to no avail.  We came home and called the DNR and reported the incident.

Talk about pissed off !!!

It's degenerates like this that give hunters a bad name.  Not only to be driving with a loaded gun in the car, but to stop 50 feet from a house, on the road and shoot a tom turkey surrounded by our other turkeys, chickens, ducks and geese in their yard.

The best 30 foot shots of his life. And he needed 2 and still didn't get the job done right.

Somewhere tonight this a_ _ hole is bragging to his friends about his hunting abilities.

Well I hope he chokes on his turkey dinner.

Michigan

Michigan according to Jeff Foxworthy...If you shoot a Whitetail Buck and you call Michigan Deer Trackn Hounds to find it you may live in Michigan..If your local Dairy Queen is closed from September through May, you may live in Michigan. If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they don’t even work there, you may live in Michigan. If you’ve worn shorts and a jacket at the same time, you may live in Michigan. If you’ve had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed a wrong number, you may live in Michigan. If “vacation” means going anywhere North of Grand Rapids for the weekend, you may live in Michigan. If you measure distance in hours, you may live in Michigan. If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you may live in Michigan. If you have switched from ‘heat’ to ‘A/C’ in the same day and back again, you may live in Michigan. If you can drive 75 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you may live in Michigan. If you install security lights on your house and garage, butleave both doors unlocked, you may live in Michigan. If you carry jumpers in your car and your wife knows how to use them, you may live in Michigan. If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit, you may live in Michigan. If the speed limit on the highway is 70 mph -you’re going 80 and everybody is passing you, you may live in Michigan. If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow, you may live in Michigan. If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction, you may live in Michigan. If you have more miles on your snow blower than your car, you may live in Michigan. If you find 10 degrees “a little chilly”, you may live in Michigan. If you actually understand any of these jokes, repost this so all of your Michigan friends and others can see, you definitely do live - or have lived - in Michigan. Best. State. Ever.

Rabbit Genetics

I acquired Sadie and her daughter Susie many years ago as an attempt to start breeding meat rabbits.  I got them from a lady going out of raising California Giants for show.  It was an enlightening visit to her rabbitry where I had my choice of over 50 almost identical rabbits of various ages. Only 2 really stood out Susie and her sister Freakie.  Susie because of her totally un-Californian color and Freakie because of her long flowing hair and non-descript color.  If you click on the above photo you can see that Sadie has a small tuft of hair between her ears and Susie has larger tuft of hair that extends down her neck and onto her forehead. She also has hair on her cheeks and under her chin. These longer tufts of hair are wispy and finer than the rest of the fur covering their bodies.  I wish that I had a photo of Freakie, but they were lost in a computer crash. She had this long wispy hair all over her body and her coloration was about every shade of brown and grey mixed together.  When I asked the woman about these rabbits she was totally dumbfounded about how they came about.  She had been breeding her pedigreed rabbits for many years and showed me her album of                                                                                                                                        pictorial pedigrees on all of her rabbits going back over 30 generations.  Sadie was a registered doe raised by her and had been used to breed many litters of solid Californian marked rabbits.  But her last litter had these two unusual bunnies in it.  For some reason that she couldn't even describe she kept them instead of destroying them.  I guess it was the shock factor as she had never had non-typical Cali. bunnies before.
As I had no intention of showing them, it didn't matter to me. And since I have always had a flair for the unusual, I took them both.  And their mother,father and one of their brothers. I had planned on getting some more Californians but these would be the base of my new breeding stock.  But first I needed to get rid of all of my large Mini Rex or small Rex rabbits I had been raising for manure production for my garden.
Well the best laid plans of mice and men...........
After some health issues and grandchildren being born and garden increases and chicken coop expansions etc. etc. etc.  Suffice it to say the meat rabbit plans got lost in the shuffle.  I was raising bunnies for pets for the local pet shop and online sales.  People wanted smaller rabbits so I bought some Mini-Dutch's to breed.
During all of this One of my Rex does had a litter born on Valentines Day and there were a set of twin black bunnies with identical white markings and feet, that I kept.  Twin 2 had a litter close to the birth of my grandson Owen, I frequently shortened his name to 0-1 in my writings and named an odd colored buck bunny that we intended to keep 0-2.

Somehow in the need for space, after 0-2 grew into adulthood he was placed in the same pen that Susie was in and the only thing keeping them separate was a chicken-wire divider.  I knew better, but had other concerns at the time and since he was so much smaller I doubted that even if he got to Susie that he could do anything.  Well again I was proved wrong.  Susie had a nice large litter and one little black bunny started growing fuzz.

Fuzzy Butt was born.

And what a beautiful oddity he was.

Then I got interested in an online meat rabbit group and posted these photos on my new farm page and got many comments as to breed and availability of this rabbit.  Since it was a genetic abnormality, I had no idea if I could duplicate this result.  He was the only one out of eight litter mates to show any hair abnormality.

I soon forgot about Fuzzy Butt and returned plans for crossing Susie to a larger breed.  I had previously purchased an American Chinchilla buck and a Flemish Giant doe and was having problems with her conceiving. So I bred Susie to the Am. Chin. buck Cassity to see if he was the problem.

Susie again had 8 bunnies.  This time she threw 2 abnormal kits.  One white doe with all over long fuzzy hair.

And one light brown buck with a mane.  As these were planned to be born in time for Easter bunnies, I had all of them spoken for before they were even born.  But I had planned on keeping one female for breeding purposes.  When the time came for them to go to their new homes one person backed out and it left me with the only buck of the litter too.

And I had plans for him.
The founder of Backyard Meat Rabbits, had showed interest in Fuzzy Butt and the photos I had posted of the litter.  So I contacted him and let him know that the little maned guy was available.  He came and got him and named him "Mufasa".  As I said in a previous post, he is now a "house pet" and his owner suggested I breed Fuzzy Butt to his mother Susie to see if I would get more that carried the lion look gene.

I did but was a little reluctant to do so too quickly.  Susie just turned 6 years old and I didn't want to over stress her, so I waited 2 months before I allowed her to breed.  She only had 2 bunnies.

One looked silvery white and the other a dark brown that was almost black.
Sadly three weeks later during a massive heat wave I lost Susie along with Cassity and a pure breed Flemish Giant buck and a Registered Dutch doe.  It was a devastating day, they had made it through the worst heat of the day only to succumb by early evening.
The bunnies however did excellent, we moved them indoors and pampered them for a few days.  Making sure they were eating and drinking on their own before we put them back outside.

As they grew the silvery one began showing signs of the recessive gene we were looking for,

I called her Fuzz Ball in honor of her father.

The other one became Susie II for her mother. Plans are to breed them to Mufasa

 and see if we can bred a larger Lionhead type rabbit line.