Refinement Database

Database on Refinement of Housing, Husbandry, Care, and Use of Animals in Research

This database, created in 2000, is updated every four months with newly published scientific articles, books, and other publications related to improving or safeguarding the welfare of animals used in research.

Tips for using the database:

  • This landing page displays all of the publications in the database.
  • Use the drop-down menus to filter these publications by Animal Type, Setting, and/or Topic.
  • Clicking on a parent category (e.g., Rodent) will include publications relating to all the items in that category (e.g., Chinchilla, Gerbil, Guinea Pig, etc.).
  • You may also add a keyword to further narrow your search.
  • Please note that at this time, only publications dated 2010 or later (with some exceptions) can be filtered by Animal Type and Topic, and only publications dated 2020 or later (with some exceptions) can be filtered by Setting. Most publications older than 2010 can only be searched by keyword. 
Rault, J.-L., Truong, S., Hemsworth, L. et al. 2019. Gentle abdominal stroking (‘belly rubbing’) of pigs by a human reduces EEG total power and increases EEG frequencies. Behavioural Brain Research 374, 111892.

The neurobiological response to gentle touch remains poorly understood, especially in the context of human-animal interaction. A novel approach allowed recording the pig electroencephalogram (EEG) cranially epidurally and wirelessly during positive interactions with a human...

Horback, K.M., Parsons, T.D. 2019. Judgement bias testing in group-housed gestating sows. Behavioural Processes 159, 86-92.

Societal concerns about animal welfare have triggered the movement of gestating sows from individual stalls to group housing in many countries. Common methods of assessing sow welfare focus on overt physical ailments, and potentially neglect...

Mather, J. A., Carere, C. 2019. Consider the individual: Personality and welfare in invertebrates. In: The Welfare of Invertebrate Animals. Carere, C., Mather, J. (eds), 229-245. Springer, Cham.

Personality, defined as consistent between-individual variation in clusters of behavioral traits independent of factors such as age or sex, emerges in most animal species tested so far. The number of invertebrate species discovered to have...

McMillan, F. D. (ed). 2019. Mental Health and Well-being in Animals (2nd ed). CABI, Wallingford, UK.

This second edition is fully revised, expanded, and comprehensively updated with the most current knowledge about the full array of mental health issues seen in animals. Written by key opinion leaders, internationally-recognized experts and specialists...

Machado, M., Oliveira da Silva, I. J. 2019. Does farm animals experience emotions and feelings? Journal of Animal Behaviour and Biometeorology 7(4), 170-175.

In recent years, there has been a great increase in the interest of "emotion" and how it can be studied and translated from animals. Emotions arise when the brain receives an external stimulus, while the...

Špinka, M. 2019. Animal agency, animal awareness and animal welfare. Animal Welfare 28(1), 11–20.

In nature, animals need to actively engage with the environment in order to prosper in survival and reproduction. Hence, agency is a central adaptive characteristic of animal life. In this paper, I propose that from...

Luo, L., Reimert, I., de Haas, E. N. et al. 2019. Effects of early and later life environmental enrichment and personality on attention bias in pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus). Animal Cognition 22(6), 959–972.

We investigated effects of early and later life housing on attention bias, as an indicator of affective state, in pigs differing in coping style [reactive (LR) vs. proactive (HR)]. Pigs (n = 128) in barren or enriched...

Gottlieb, D. H., Del Rosso, L, Sheikhi, F. et al. 2018. Personality, environmental stressors, and diarrhea in Rhesus macaques: An interactionist perspective. American Journal of Primatology 80(12), e22908.

Previous research has repeatedly shown both personality and psychological stress to predict gastrointestinal disorders and chronic diarrhea in humans. The goal of the present research was to evaluate the role of personality, as well as...

Linden, J.B., Capitanio, J.P., McCowan, B. et al. 2018. Coping style and cortisol levels in infancy predict hair cortisol following new group formation in captive rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). American Journal of Primatology 80(12), e22938.

Social instability in primate groups has been used as a model to understand how social stress affects human populations. While it is well established that individual cercopithecines have different temperaments or personalities, little is known...

Hopper, L. M., Cronin, K. A., Ross, S. R. 2018. A multi-institutional assessment of a short-form personality questionnaire for use with macaques. Zoo Biology 37(5), 281-289

There are two commonly used methods for calculating primates’ personality dimensions, behavioral assessments and surveys, which can be used separately or in conjunction. However, these methods have limitations. Behavioral assessments, such as the novel object...

Cronin, K. A., Bethell, E. J., Jacobson, S. L. et al. 2018. Evaluating mood changes in response to anthropogenic noise with a response-slowing task in three species of zoo-housed primates. Animal Behavior and Cognition 5(2), 209–221.

In the zoo environment, anthropogenic noise is common as sound levels fluctuate due to visitors, construction, habitat design, and special events. In this study, changes in the mood of three species of zoo-housed primates in...

Adams, S. C., Guyot, C. M., Berry, K. M. et al. 2017. Hypercortisolemia and depressive-like behaviors in a rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) involved in visual research. Comparative Medicine 67(6), 529–536.

A 10-y-old cranially implanted rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) involved in visual research was presented for dull mentation and weight loss. Physical examination revealed alopecia and poor body conditioning, and bloodwork revealed marked hypercortisolemia (23 μg/dL)...

Stracke, J., Otten, W., Tuchscherer, A. et al. 2017. Dietary tryptophan supplementation and affective state in pigs. Journal of Veterinary Behavior 20, 82-90.

The assessment and provision of welfare in farm animals has become a major issue in animal science. A key element for providing good welfare is the enabling of positive affective states in the animals. As...

Schlüns, H., Welling, H., Federici, J. R. et al. 2017. The glass is not yet half empty: Agitation but not Varroa treatment causes cognitive bias in honey bees. Animal Cognition 20(2), 233–241.

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are prone to judge an ambiguous stimulus negatively if they had been agitated through shaking which simulates a predator attack. Such a cognitive bias has been suggested to reflect an internal...

Goumon, S., Špinka, M. 2016. Emotional contagion of distress in young pigs is potentiated by previous exposure to the same stressor. Animal Cognition 19(3), 501–511.

This study tested whether emotional contagion occurs when piglets directly observe a penmate in distress (restraint) and whether there is an effect of previous experience on the response to subsequent restraint or exposure to conspecific...

Reimert, I., Bolhuis, J. E., Kemp, B. et al. 2015. Emotions on the loose: Emotional contagion and the role of oxytocin in pigs. Animal Cognition 18(2), 517–532.

We studied emotional contagion, a simple form of empathy, and the role of oxytocin herein in pigs. Two training pigs per pen (n = 16 pens) were subjected to a positive treatment (pairwise access to...

Camus, S. M. J., Rochais, C., Blois-Heulin, C. et al. 2014. Depressive-like behavioral profiles in captive-bred single- and socially-housed rhesus and cynomolgus macaques: A species comparison. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 8, 47.

Background: To unravel the causes of major depressive disorder (MDD), the third leading cause of disease burden around the world, ethological animal models have recently been proposed. Our previous studies highlighted a depressive-like profile among...

Sneddon, L. U., Elwood, R. W., Adamo, S. A. et al. 2014. Defining and assessing animal pain. Animal Behaviour 97, 201-212.

The detection and assessment of pain in animals is crucial to improving their welfare in a variety of contexts in which humans are ethically or legally bound to do so. Thus clear standards to judge...

Murphy, E., Nordquist, R. E., van der Staay, F. J. 2014. A review of behavioural methods to study emotion and mood in pigs (Sus scrofa). Applied Animal Behaviour Science 159, 9-28.

The study of emotions in animals is of increasing importance to a number of disciplines such as animal welfare science and affective neuroscience. Pigs are a common farm animal species, most often reared in intensive...

Reimert, I., Bolhuis, J. E., Kemp, B. 2012. Indicators of positive and negative emotions and emotional contagion in pigs. Physiology & Behavior 109, 42-50.

For the welfare of group-housed animals, such as pigs, the emotional state of an individual pig is relevant, but also the extent to which pen mates are affected by the distress or pleasure of other...

Coleman, K. 2012. Individual differences in temperament and behavioral management practices for nonhuman primates. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 137(3-4), 106-113.

This review will examine how individual differences in temperament might affect, or be affected by, behavioral management practices for captive primates. Measuring temperament may help us predict the outcome of social introductions. It can also...

West, A. M., Leland, S. P., Muhammad, F. et al. 2010. Temperament ratings of laboratory rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta): Effects of cage level and room composition. American Journal of Primatology 72(S1), 42. (33rd Meeting of the American Society of Primatologists Scientific Program, Abstract #52)

Measures of temperament in nonhuman primates generally reflect interactions between inherent individual characteristics and environmental contexts, and they may be indicators of physical and psychological well-being. Heritable aspects of temperament have been identified, but it...