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Abstract. Although there were many attempts of the local breeders to create a first Romanian Rabbit breed during the last century, they failed to finish it. Before the 2000's Romania had no certified rabbit breed. All three rabbit breeds produced and certified in Romania so far have been recently created and consolidated: the Transylvanian Giant Rabbit, the Rabbit of Cluj, and the Szekler Rabbit. These three breeds were certified by the National Livestock Production Agency in 2016 and, having in view the present EU legislation, it is debatable if the forms of "homologation" according to the old Romanian legislation are necessary as long as the term "breed homologation" does not exist in the EU legislation. The previous experiences of livestock conservation showed us that large number of breeds and relatively low numbers of breeders can produce populational bottleneck in some breeds, followed by decline and extinction. Therefore, in our opinion three native rabbit breeds are enough for the Romanian rabbit breeders carrying capacity.
Key Words: rabbit breeds, Oryctolagus cuniculus, Romanian breeds, ANZ, Entente Européenne.
Introduction. Although there were numerous attempts of the breeders to create a Romanian Rabbit breed during the last century, before the 2000's Romania had no certified rabbit breed. All three rabbit breeds produced and certified in Romania so far have been recently created and consolidated (Petrescu-Mag et al 2009; Botha et al 2011; Botha et al 2015) (Table 1).
Three Romanian Rabbit Breeds. The first breed created, with a significant number of broodstock and already well known among the Romanian Rabbit breeders, is the Transylvanian Giant Rabbit (TGR) (Petrescu-Mag et al 2011, 2012, 2014a,b). It was roughly described in the scientific literature for the first time in 2009 (Petrescu-Mag et al 2009) and it was awarded three titles of European Champion (one of them at Leipzig, 2012, and the other two at Metz, 2015). Besides, the breed was presented in several tens of national exhibitions, but also in exhibitions held in Hungary and Serbia. The most important aspect is that this breed was characterized from the morphological, productive and reproductive points of view, and these outcomes were published in a scientific work (Petrescu-Mag et al 2014a), although there are many aspects which could be further investigated (Oroian et al 2016;...