RECORD KEEPING
 

As you begin your breeding program, keep in mind that record keeping is a very vital part in knowing what your animals are doing. Without good records you will never know if there is a problem with a breeding pair until the problem has affected a good portion of your herd. Records also can give you a sense of how you are progressing in improving your quality and staying current with the rest of the chinchilla community.

Even if you do not know the original registry of your animals, begin by assigning each a number. A name is okay but a number is essential. Registry numbers are usually listed with a ranch brand, year letter, and number.

A ranch brand is usually a 4 letter name chosen by you or another rancher to represent their animals. Ours is OKES because of our last name being Ouderkirk and the oak trees around our home all kind of smooshed together. The Mutation Chinchilla Breeders register a ranch by a more generic number such as MO045.

Each year is represented by an alphabet letter so as to differentiate animals. The year 1996 was the letter "E", 1997 was "F", and so on. Some letters, such as G, I, 0, Q, U, and W are not used. The year 2000 was K and 2001 is L.

The actual number that is assigned according to its birth order for the year. The first animal born on our ranch in 2001 was OKES Ll. We also list our animals with an abbreviation of color behind the number if it is a mutation. Standards do not have this.

The next few pages represent various records that should be kept for a good breeding program. Some of these pages include "Baby Birth Records", "Dam Production", "Sire Production", and "Sales". Baby births are recorded to keep a running tally of all animals born on your ranch each year. Dam and Sire production records help to find various problems, if such should occur, that can easily be eliminated. Sales are for tax purposes and to help you realize in some sense how you are progressing in your herd improvement.

An identification tag should be kept at each cage so that specialized information such as birthday, lineage, etc. can be at your fingertips when working with your animals.

As you get larger, you may also want to consider a computer program. We recommend ChinRec which has been specially designed for chinchillas and includes many easy-to-use features that speed up and eliminate errors that are part of keeping records by hand. You will still probably want to maintain a "Baby Book" in your chin area as a check. The records pages that are shown are from this program.