Heeeaaaaaa!  Heeeaaaaa!  Gottagoodonehere, waddaya gonna giv fer it?  One!  Gottta one, gimme two, gotta one gimme two!   Gotta two gimme twoanahalf, gotta two gimme twoanahalf now!  Gotta twoanahalf now gimme three!

I thought it would a a good learning experience for you folks to see just what we have at the rat auction in Canada going on.  I logged into our account and downloaded our graded rat listing.  Remember that we graded our own rats and were trying to be as tough as we could on it.  Our thoughts were to be hard on ourselves and then see just what they came up with at auction.  Well, here is how the grading went:

OurRatGrades

(Hopefully you can see the pdf document)

I then took our grade list and compared it to their, just in the size departments and then by damage.  In the 3XL-XXL our grade was only 8 hides in the XXL and none in the 3XL, where as they graded us with 22 rats in that bracket!  Up 14 from our grading.  In the XL bracket we counted ourselves as having 119, the auction house gave us 157!  Up 38 rats.  That tells me we were quite hard on ourselves.  And then I got to the Large size, where we had ourselves looking at 504 rats….the auction house banged us with 351, down 153 hides.  But then 52 of them were graded Bigger than we had figured, and 82 were graded smaller.  ERROR ERROR….52 were graded larger, while 101 were graded smaller and even though you can’t see it because it’s on a page number 2, they put 62 of those smaller sized hides in with the 84 medium sized ones we had graded.  I feel pretty good about our grading as compared to theirs, but it’s obvious we need to do more of this grading stuff to get a better handle on it.

As we understand the process, they received our rats (733), documented the receipt and assigned the whole batch to my account number.  Then they carefully went through and graded each pelt by size, grade and anything else that was special with the hides.  With over 200,000 muskrats to deal with you know they didn’t take a whole lot of time grading them.  But, then each rat was classified in specific groups, some only one rat was put into that group, others 2 or more.  The most rats we have in any one group is 107.  Each of the classified groups is then called a “Lot”.  And that is what you are seeing in this first file.  Our rats broken out into “lots”.

If you are interested in some of the grading classifications here is what they look for:

Grading

So, a GDFL grade means, “Good, Well furred, Solid, Heavy, Supple feel fur that was caught in the Fall of the year”.  It’s my understanding that the desire is to have all Good Quality and very large at the same time.  But we all know that can’t happen.

Ok, once everyone has had their furs graded and put into lots, they take all the common lots from all the shippers and group them together into what they call “Strings”.  So, we are not the only ones with these lot numbers.

Here is that listing:

StringNumbers

Looking at our lot number 481610, we have 2 hides in that lot, but in the string there are 1600 rats classified as 3XL-XXL I-II and graded GDFL.

What does it all mean?  Well, I’m just going to have to guess.  When Lot number 481610 comes up before the bidding audience, they are going to start waiving their signs and the auctioneer is going to be sounding out the dollar figures and at some point in all the confusion the gavel will fall and the last one with his bidder number in the air is going to buy all 1600 rats for whatever the last dollar figure was called out.  If they go for $5 each, well we will get $10 for our two rats,  minus the commission for the auction house (9%).

Let’s look closer at the lot number and grading of our rats.  Notice the Asterisk (*) on some of them.  I wrote to the auction house and asked them what that meant:  Their reply, and I’ll type it like they wrote me back:

“We have a wild fur label “NAFA Northern” as part of our promotional program.  It is a quality designation and the only skins that qualify for the label are SEL and I quality skins.  These are indicated by the asterisk (*)”.

I take that to mean those furs are “something special” and when you calculate all the furs with the asterisk in our batch, we have 339 in that category!  That’s 46% of our furs!  Tell me the extra care in drying and the combing didn’t pay off!

May the gavel fall on a high price!

Bears Butt

May 16, 2014