How To Tattoo Your Rabbit

Choosing Your Personalized Rabbitry or Pedigree Tattoo
 

Tattoos, necessary for show and breeding rabbit identification, can also display a wealth of information.  Although you can simply tattoo a random combination of letters or numbers in your rabbit's ear, a well-thought out system of personalized rabbitry tattooing can provide a lot of information with just a quick glance in the rabbit's ear:

  • Rabbit's Parentage or Litter ID; some breeders tattoo the first letters of both parents' names in the ear, and some even tattoo a litter number or other litter ID into the rabbit's ear
  • Rabbit's Gender; some tattoo a 'b' or 'd' in the ear as gender ID - be 100 percent sure you know the rabbit's gender before you choose to do this!
  • Rabbit's Birthdate; I've seen some tattoo the month/yr in their rabbit's ear
  • Breeder's Identification; a popular tattoo choice is to tattoo some form of breeder's ID in the rabbit's ear - we use 'LL' for LaReau Lops, after each tattoo number.  Some use just an initial or two from their name, others use an abbreviation of their rabbitry name.
  • Rabbit's Name; another popular tattoo method is to just tattoo the rabbit's name in the ear. 

You can choose almost any tattoo configuration you wish according to your needs or what info you think is important (or handy) to have as your rabbit's identification and on his/her pedigree.  Think about all the different data you can display in your tattoos and pedigrees and try to come up with a system or pattern you like and that can be used routinely for your rabbitry - below are examples of tattoos so you can get some ideas:

 

57LL

Here is the tattoo system we use-we number each rabbit consecutively and the trailing 'LL' is our rabbitry 'stamp', short for 'LaReau Lops'.

PBCO1

In this example, the first 2 letters signify the buck's name (Peanut Butter) and the 'CO' signifies the doe (Cocoa), the trailing '1' means this rabbit is the first rabbit in the litter

TB23

Similar to the system we use but the numbers follow the rabbitry abbreviation - here, fictitious 'Tom's Bunnies' is the 'TB' and this is rabbit number 23.

SAMMY

Here is the rabbit's name simply used as the tattoo. 

SSKJD

You can get as creative as you want to serve your needs:  in this example, the 'SS' is the breeder's initials (Sandy Statter), the next letter is the first initial of the sire's name (King), the next letter is the initial of the dam's name (Janie), and the last letter signifies that this rabbit is indeed a Doe.

 

Some considerations when choosing a tattoo scheme for your rabbitry or pedigrees:

 

Length of Tattoo - How Many Letters/Numbers to Use?

If you are using a clamp-style tattooer to tattoo your rabbits, you don't have much to consider here because your tattoo will automatically be limited by how many digits can fit into your tattooer - usually 8 or less.

If you are using a pen tattooer, you can make your tattoo as lengthy as you want but there are still some important points to consider; many computerized rabbit programs, such as those used to process rabbit show reports, track rabbits, and even rabbit registration, only allow space to enter shorter tattoos - usually under a dozen digits or even less.  

It is advisable to use shorter tattoos if possible.  Although you may not personally use one of these programs as mentioned in the paragraph above, if anyone else will be recording your rabbit's tattoo, (such as when you show your rabbit, or sell its' offspring and new owners enter your pedigrees into their computer programs) a too-long tattoo may be difficult to process and will most likely need to be truncated on show reports, breed reports and such.

On ARBA rabbit registration forms you are limited to 30 spaces for the rabbit's registered name - now perhaps you are not concerned because your rabbit has a pedigree name in addition to his or her tattoo, but if no separate rabbit name is on the pedigree, the tattoo is used in place of the name and only 30 spaces of your tattoo can be used for registration of rabbits through ARBA..

 

Rabbitry or Name Initials Used By Another Breeder

Occasionally you may find that another breeder is already using the same tattoo initials as the ones you intend to use.  While there are no actual 'rules' that would prevent you from also using the same initials, it is just common courtesy to choose something else, plus why propagate confusion?  If both of you are from the same area or could possibly attend the same rabbit shows and sell stock to people in the same area - using the same tattooing patterns can cause some problems especially for those who would like to ID rabbit breeders based on their rabbit's tattoos.

When we first started breeding rabbits, we naturally chose to use "LL xxx" as our tattoo scheme, (LaReau Lops followed by a number), but we found out that another breeder, also raising French Lops, was already using this pattern (Lotsa Lops).  To avoid confusion with this other breeder's tattoos, (on pedigrees, show reports and the like) we switched our tattoo scheme around so the "LL" is trailing after the individual rabbit numbers.  This simple change allows distinction between our rabbits and Lotsa Lops rabbits.

In your quest to choose unique tattoo initials, it can be difficult to find out if one is already in use by another breeder - sometimes it helps to look through several rabbits' pedigrees and read the ear numbers recorded to become familiar with those common in your breed, you can also ask around at rabbit shows, plus it might be useful to post your tattoo pattern intentions on one of the popular MSN or Yahoo internet rabbit forums or discussion groups and see if anyone is aware of your intended pattern being already used by someone else.

Now, if another breeder is using the same tattoo pattern you'd like to use, but they raise completely different rabbit breeds than you, or perhaps the breeder is a youth breeder and you are an open breeder - I imagine it might be ok for you to use the same tattoo patterns without causing many problems - still, it will be 'cleaner' if you can simply choose another pattern.

 

So....have you now picked a tattoo pattern or scheme to use for your rabbitry?  You'll be ready for the next step as soon as you know what tattoo you want in your rabbit's ear!

12/22/06 - Coming soon.....

Our next page in our How To Tattoo Your Rabbit series:

Getting Ready To Tattoo Your Rabbit-'The Bunny Burrito'

NOTE:  our articles on tattooing are rather new and not complete - soon we will embellish these pages with helpful pictures and more info!  Stop back soon