mark miller
Miller Chinchillas
I've recently discussed this topic with a couple friends of mine that raise chins. I've raised chins and grew up around chins all my life. I've seen thousands of baby chins born in that time. About 15 years ago, we had someone come to our chin barn to buy a young animal. She was walking down the row of young growers that we had at the time and she stopped and pulled out a 6 month old female that was the runt out of a litter of 3 and said "oh, you have a dwarf chin". This was the first time we had heard the term "dwarf" used with chins. We figured that was just the way she saw the smaller under developed chin compared to others its age. Then we started hearing the term "dwarf" used by other chin people as what seemed like a gimmick term to sell what normally would have been a undesired small chin with a flatter looking forehead and face and little round brevi-looking ears and round decent conformation body but just a little smaller than a normal chin. They appear to me to look like a miniature version of a large brevicadata type chinchilla. The term "dwarf" really took off with people in the pet world, and many truly believe there is a common genetic link between "dwarf" chinchillas. Personally, I think it's just a cutesy term that someone came up with to describe a certain appearance or look that some small chins have and not a related genetic abnormality. The so called "dwarf" gene may exist in chinchillas, but as far as I know has not been genetically proven to be linked in any of the represented "dwarf" chinchillas out there. Gimmick term or genetic classification, what are your thoughts?