My Day with Urban Farm Magazine

First, I must apologize.  Apologize to my "rabbit fancy" friends and acquaintances that have owned, cared for, bred and shown rabbits for years, and really paid their dues. 

A couple of months ago I got an e-mail asking me if I would be willing to be video-ed clipping one of my rabbits for Urban Farm Magazine.  They are a member of the Hobby Farms  family of magazines.  They are going to run an article in an upcoming issue about keeping rabbits in an urban or suburban setting, and the video will appear on their website as an accompaniment to the article.  They picked me because their offices are here in Lexington, and I had communicated with them about coming to the Kentucky Sheep and Fiber Festival last May, and mentioned that I have Angoras.  In other words, I was what they had available.  I didn't say anything about it, because I wanted to wait to see if it actually happened.  The date was firmed up a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday, I spent a delightful hour with Lisa and Rachel of Urban Farm Magazine, in Lisa's back yard .

It was a glorious day, sunny and temperature just right.  They had a table set up and I just clipped and talked about Angoras for an hour.  They will edit it down to about 5 minutes for the website.  I took Truffle to clip, and Holly to show how sometimes a coat will grow out at all different rates.  She has a patch on her back that is partly 1/2 inch and unchanged since the last time I clipped her in May, with some 1 inch patches of black outer coat (guard hair) and a very thick, long 'petticoat' of coat that could be clipped now.  Both of them behaved well - at the shoot.  Holly saw me get the transport cages out this morning, and she knew.   She bit me when I reached in the cage to take her out.  (I didn't tell them that)  Truffle was a trooper, but was embarrassingly more matted than I thought he was, given that I had been working on him regularly for over a week. Some of the wool came off in hunks, not wispy, floaty, locks.  It was apparent a week or two ago that his coat was going, and I have found that he really begins to mat then. It wasn't a real complete job - his belly wool was short and didn't need clipped but I went through the motions.

By the end, both of the girls seemed considerably more interested in Angoras than at the beginning, and they said they have gotten lots of positive feedback when they posted on Facebook that they would be doing an article about keeping rabbits. Terrific!  I really want to see Angoras grow in popularity here.  The author of the article is from California and will give an overview of the pluses of rabbit keeping - fiber, meat, manure/fertilizer - but the breed she keeps are not fiber rabbits.

So, if you go online to see the video later this fall, be merciful.  I couldn't say everything in an hour, much less the edited 5 minutes, and I just hope that as a relative newbie rabbit owner, I didn't say anything that was flat-out incorrect!