This seems like a lot of money to me, so I did some quick calculations. This PDF document states that in rabbits the volume of blood is 56 ml/kg, which translates to 67.596639kg of ‘rabbit’ to make one US gallon.
Assuming an average rabbit weight of 1.75kg (Wikipedia average weight of European rabbit) this means I need just 38/39 rabbits fully drained to get a hefty $20,000. Even allowing for sub-100% ‘drainage’ it still seems too good to be true. From what I gather rabbits breed quite well so farming them should be straightforward, of course you would need to invest in equipment to keep things as sterile as possible but it should pay for itself given time.
What am I missing here? Has the article pulled this figure out of thin air or is there some difficulty in collecting the blood that i’m not seeing?
Just a guess, but I would imagine the high cost is because they want very highly consistent rabbit blood, without any infections or abnormality.
This would probably entail breeding a genetically stable line of rabbits (very expensive) or buying some breeding stock off someone who has already done so (also likely to be very expensive). You would then need a very expensive facility to keep them in to the standards required by your clients, and be prepared to meet all sorts of conditions.
You will probably also find that regulatory standards that you have to meet are much, much higher for laboratory animals than for pet or food animals.
You also need to persuade your research industry clients to start using your animals, rather than stick with their existing suppliers, recognising that they might stand to lose millions if a study has to be halted because the animals get sick.
You also run the risk that some nutcase will start mailing threats or bombs to your house.
The high prices are a reflection of the risk premium. In addition to enigmatic’s points, wild rabbits have been know to be quite vicious and deadly. There is an obscure documentary floating around on the net with more information. I’m sure some (several) Doper can help you out with memorized lines.
Many years ago, I worked in a biomedical research lab. (Before someone gets their knickers in a twist here: Animal rights activists would have been very disappointed, I saw none of the pain and suffering that they would expect, the animals were far better treated than most farm animals are.)
One of my jobs was to collect blood from rabbits and rats, usually for immunology work. Our rabbits were big, on average around 4kg. We would take 40 ml from the ear vein every 2-3 months or so under sedation. Rarely, we would do a heart tap under general anaesthesia and drain as much blood as possible. You could get around 50% of the total blood volume that way, a lot of blood remains in the internal organs. (Obviously, those rabbits never woke up from their anaesthetic.) A 250g rat would yield around 10 ml blood from cardiac puncture.
All of enigmatic’s points are solid. Scientific work needs to be reproducible, so variables have to be kept to a minimum and conditions have to be completely controlled. Animal welfare laws vary from country to country, but where I worked, animals could only be used for research if specifically bred or purchased for that purpose.
And here, I was thinking you were referencing Watership Down. “My chief rabbit told me to guard this tunnel, and so here I will stay”. Or, a bit less eloquently, “Silflay hraka, u embleer rah!”.
