 Proud Members of |  After awhile, I missed having a chinchilla, so I purchased another standard male from a local breeder, thinking I would just have another pet. However, I got the chinchilla bug after visiting the breeder and being introduced to so many wonderful animals and the mutation chinchillas. Shortly after, I purchased a beige, a mosaic, and an ebony, all from local breeders. At this point I had not even considered breeding yet. After awhile, I had found the chinchilla community and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to learn from various local breeders. Once I began purchasing better animals for breeding from local breeders, I decided to house them together in pet cages and my grandpa began to build more and more cages for me. I put them into pairs or trios for breeding, one male to one or two females. I met more breeders in surrounding states and began learning information about the chinchilla organizations we have in this country. I joined MCBA (Mutation Chinchilla Breeders Association) and began attending meetings at the branch level. Also around this time I began visiting Doug Wilson, a local rancher who was retiring and I began purchasing animals from him. I learned even more about breeding chinchillas from him, and also what it takes to show chinchillas. Doug Wilson was very successful in showing chinchillas and was widely known for his mutations, particularly whites and beiges. I was fortunate to be able to learn from Doug and purchase so many chinchillas from him before his retirement. My numbers went drastically up and I made a change in my breeding practices and caging style. I attended my first chinchilla show in January 2004. It was the Heartland Show in Omaha, Nebraska. Prior to going to the show, I joined ECBC (Empress Chinchilla Breeders Cooperative). The show was fascinating to me, and I knew showing chinchillas would be my next step. Going to the show made me want to learn more about showing, attend more shows and visit more ranches. During this time I also registered my ranch name and brand with Empress, which was Johnson Chinchillas, CCJ. Over the next year I visited several ranches in various states and at each ranch I learned even more. It also gave me the opportunity to purchase even more high quality animals! I began showing animals the following show season on a very small scale. In the summer of 2005, I had a change in my life that forced me to drastically downsize my herd. Lucky for me, by this time I had met Bryan, who had the same love for the animals as I did. I knew I couldn’t get rid of all of the chinchillas, so I kept around 40. Bryan and I were lucky and later that year we slowly began to rebuild our herd. I made the decision not to show that show season and put the animals I had been growing out for show into breeding. However, I continued to attend shows that season with Bryan by my side, learning everything that he could about shows. We got married in the summer of 2006 and the ranch name changed to Stark Chinchillas, along with a new ranch brand, STRK. Now our herd is back over 100 animals and the 2006-2007 showing of our animals has proven successful for us in our eyes. We are very pleased to have chinchillas and we only hope to grow from here! I am so fortunate to have so many ranchers/breeders to have visited and learned from. I appreciate you so much for helping me with these wonderful animals! Thanks in particular for all of your help to Bob and Vicki Merritt, Rich and Jan Ryerson, Ralph and Barbara Shoots, Jim Ritterspach, everyone in the Heartland Chinchilla Group and also thanks to everyone in the Oklahoma ECBC Branch, you’ve been a wonderful help! |
