Providing inadequate anesthesia and analgesia will lead to the rabbit regaining consciousness during surgery and flapping its legs. Ketamine (50-60 mg kg Inter Venous) is the most preferred drug and should be administered slowly through the lateral auricular vein after the animal is immobilized in a special chamber.

Anesthetic agents are selected based on the health of the animal and the duration and invasiveness of the procedure. These animals can be provided with water until approximately 60 minutes prior to starting the anesthesia. Rabbits are subject to dehydration, so it should be ascertained that they always have plenty of water. Preoperative fasting is not necessary because vomiting during induction of anesthesia has not been reported in this species. Figure 1 represents the phylogenetic tree for vertebrates. If there is more than one alternative, one should select the least phylogenetically developed animals available in sufficient quantity. But the wide range of animal species gives choice to the investigators for a most appropriate animal for their study design.

Arriving at an animal model which suits all fields of application is a current goal in research and that is almost impossible. International standards established regarding the species suitable for testing implantation of materials in bone state that dogs, sheep, goat, pigs, or rabbits are suitable. Monkeys were at a second level and rats, rabbits were at the third level. Despite the structural similarities in organic composition between human bone and canine, implant-associated changes evident in a canine model may not be as apparent in the human situation where there is a lower rate of remodeling. Dogs are the most widely used animal model in periodontal research, especially in the periodontal tissue regeneration studies and as periodontal disease models. The emotional attitude of some researchers, mainly in cases involving domestic animals (e.g., dogs and cats) can be a problem in long experiments where the researcher may become emotionally attached to the animal. When research is performed on the appropriate animals, the information obtained should approximate what can be expected in human beings, i.e., animal that is phylogenetically similar to human beings. The first step in any study is to review the literature on the model on which to perform the experiment.

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