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The box you choose is important. In most situations the box should be insulated. If not a fully insulated box, some sort of insulation should be provided. The rise and fall of temperatures during the shipping process is very harmful for most animals...humans too. It's the equivalent of walking in and out of air-conditioned building into the hot sun over and over or flying in an airplane with the cold air blowing on your neck. Mitigating the changing temperature is important and insulation is the best way to do that.

Barring the need to a fully insulated Styrofoam-like box, the use of crumpled paper has significant insulation qualities. We try to use "peanuts" rather than crumpled paper but it's not because of the insulating qualities. We pack so many boxes that the ink from the newsprint and the time it takes to crumple it have become huge factors for us...but crumpled paper is a good insulation. At a minimum, regardless of the weather...insulation is a must.

Some insulation also works to cushion the animals. There is enough tossing around of the hapless animal that the shipper does not have to make it worse by allowing the container holding the critter to bounce around also. The box should be be filled with product and packing...in the case of peanuts, overfilling is required to compensate for the settling that occurs in shipping (the box will be shaken a whole lot).

In the event that you can not find a source of boxes you can also "roll your own." Good boxes can be made with a little creativity, a drive to the local home-depot-like store, a trip behind a local market and some patience.

Essentially we have found that lining a box with sheets of styrofoam-like product works very well. It's a matter of find a box, buying a small sheet of rigid foam and measuring carefully. No glue is required even.

While any box can be used, we have found that a box that has not been previously damaged is best to start with. We like to use boxes with "even" dimensions...12x12x "n" is easy to work with. If you get into boxes with quarter inch dimensions it will make your job a whole lots harder.

We have also found that using one inch thick foam sheets makes life easier. The one inch is easier on the calculations that 3/4 inch...the additional insulation is a positive bonus also. We get the rigid foam at a local home improvement  store. The material we find is plastic coated and is easy to cut. The material is cut about 1/2 of the way through with a utility knife (any sharp knife will do) and "snapped" like one might do with glass cutting. It just sort of breaks apart in a clean line along the knife cut. The edge, while not perfect looking works perfectly fine.

If you are using a 12x12 box...the first piece would be for the bottom...a 12x12 square...cut two because you are going to need one for the top also.

If you are using one inch material, the pieces for the sides are cut one inch shorter than the width of the box and two inches shorter than the depth of the box...if the box is not square you will have to cut two pairs of sides...if the box is square you can cut four of the same size.

The one inch short pieces "interlock" in the corners to that the box sides stay upright while you are packing.

The roll your own insulated box is fairly cheap to make and works very well. It's useful life is probably quite long. We're pretty sure that the box can be shipped multiple times before you need to find box of the same size to re-use the styrofoam inserts. We use these sort of boxes on our collecting trips...we made a set for each of our traveling duffels.