Rabbit Habbitry owners are: Melissa Lasater, Jennifer Leavenworth, and recently, Arild Leavenworth.
Melissa and Jennifer started raising rabbits in 1989, but the Rabbit Habbitry wasn't started until 1991. Arild joined the group in 1999, when he married Jennifer. We started with some castors, broken castors, opals, blacks and brokens blacks before mini rex were even recognized. Unfortunately, most of these mini rex were too inbred to further the quality. It wasn't until 1991 that we bought our first show quality mini rex. Melissa was fascinated by the reds, while Jen liked the tris. However, the first tris bought were not show quality, and they were very quickly gotten rid of. However, the reds continued to do well, but in a short while, Jen wanted a variety of her own. She chose lynx. Breeding lynx to red produced now reds, lynxes, and the occasional castor. Melissa fell in love with the castors, and so more were bought. Jen, at around that time, wanted opals. She had originally (1989) had an opal, but he was much too big to show. A broken opal doe was bought. Shortly after, a broken lynx buck was bought. Those two animals, being bred back to the ones we already owned, became the foundation of what we have now. That broken lynx buck, bred to a red doe, produced reds, lynxes and opals. The opal doe, bred to lynxes, produced opals, castors, chins, and smoke pearl martens. Things progressed as such, until blues started showing up. Then some blacks were bought, and a chocolate buck. Things continued on further. It wasn't until 2000 when the rabbitry split in two. Jen, now married, had her own house and space for rabbits, so she took the varieties she was interested in. From then on, the two locations work closely with each other, usually sharing bucks and trading kits back and forth.
Both rabbitries are easily accessible from Interstate 5.
Melissa currently specializes in castor, red, chin and lynx
Jennifer and Arild currently specialize in blue, opal, black, BEW and chin.
When we first started showing mini rex, we were lucky if we went to 2 shows a year, usually the Canby show, and the Albany show. Although we had a good time at the shows, we rarely placed in the top half of the class. Not to mention, in the beginning, opals, red, and lynxes were not popular varities. It was hard to get competition and to steadily improve. Then we started going to maybe 4 shows a year. Our quality was slowly improving, and maybe out of 15 rabbit entered at a show, 1 or 2 would place in the top half. Within the last 2 years, we have consistant been going to around 6 shows a year, and we always place in the top half. We normally can take BOVs or BOSVs, and have even taken several BOBs or BOSBs! We mainly go to shows in Oregon, but will be expanding into Washington shows also. Now is the difficult time, where we have to carefully cull because of limited cage space. Our quality is so good that we hate to part with our rabbits, yet we must always make room for those that are slightly better. |
