Hello, I am Larry Capuder, Sr. My family belongs to the American Gerbil Society - I am not sure how much overlap there exists between that list and this one.
Our kennel is named GerbilStrong, because we are in Strongsville, OH - a southwest suburb of Cleveland. We have 16 breeding pairs, with 29 pups currently, and many more in the pipeline - all but two of the pairs has mated. We bought out a kennel from Cincinnati that was going out of business, so we also have 17 in non-mating pairs that we want to sell cheaply to good homes so as to clear the tanks to make room for a few more breeding pairs. The formation of our kennel happened very quickly. We bought our sons a mating pair for Christmas - a Nutmeg female that they named Brownie and a Sapphire male that they named George. They have had two litters with 7 slate babies and one runt that only lived two days. At this point, I became extremely interested in gerbil genetics - the WWW proved to be a great place to learn about it. I am not an expert - an expert is someone who does not belong to your organization and lives more that fifty miles away. [I learned that one when I was an information systems consultant.] I offered to give a talk on gerbil genetics to my sons' classes - third and sixth grades - their teachers said "Yes" and both the classes and I had fun. I have ten of the 16 basic colors, plus four varieties of Colorpoint, including Burmese and Siamese. I believe that my breeding program will produce the other six basic colors and some more Colorpoint varieties. I would also like to breed Schimmel's. I just love sitting in my gerbil room and watching all the gerbils at play, at work, at sleep, nursing [its hilarious when an older larger litter feeds - poor mother!], grooming each other, etc. I look forward to learning about some of y'all's interest in gerbils. [I can use y'all because my mother had deep roots in Louisiana.] Have a great day and I look forward to being part this group, Larry C.
