How Do I Import Rabbits?

Rabbit Talk  Forum

Help Support Rabbit Talk Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

McRabbitty

New member
Joined
Sep 8, 2018
Messages
4
Reaction score
0
Location
Kenya
I live in East Africa and raise rabbits. We do not have a wide variety of rabbit breeds. We mainly keeping NZW, Cal white, Fl giant, Chinchillas and a few others. Let's say I need to introduce new breeds from overseas, e.g Harlequin, Champagne D' Argent, Beveren, Silver Fox, to name just a few. How do I transport them across oceans? Is it possible to transport frozen sperms? Or is there any other way
 
I know that. I thought there was another easier, cheaper, and less cumbersome way than transporting live animals
 
It's not possible to transport rabbit sperm. It degrades very quickly, so you can't store it. Transporting live animals is really the only way to go about it, which does get expensive and difficult.
 
Back in 2009, we imported six angora rabbits to Hawaii. Which is pretty much a 3,000 mile flight since we're an island in the middle of nowhere. (It's a nice nowhere, but still far away from just about everything else) The seller put them in a medium sized airline kennel with a wooden plate between the top and bottom halves of the shipping kennel so the does could be put on one level and the bucks on another. There were six rabbits shipped in that kennel and that's pretty much been the base for our rabbitry since 2009. It was really expensive, but sales of babies paid for it within a year.

I'd split the cost with a friend, we were going to each raise rabbits and then swap offspring back and forth to keep the lines from being too inbred, but she decided she didn't like rabbits after they arrived, so I ended up buying her out and paying for the entire shipment.

In our case, we were bringing the rabbits from one place in the country to another. We had some veterinary certificates necessary and finding an airline that would carry them, but that was all the regulations we had to deal with. If you're bringing rabbits across international boundaries, then there's probably lots more paperwork of some sort.

Perhaps, instead of bringing in multiple breeds all at the same time, one breed could be brought in and then babies sold to pay for the next breed to be brought in?
 

Latest posts

Back
Top