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. 

In the milk producing industry, most aspects of maternal behaviour are discouraged, but milk production is actively maintained in the absence of the calf. The process of milk let down, is mediated, at least partly...

In many species, environmental complexity is known to affect cognitive development, yet it is common to house dairy calves individually in restrictive environments. The hypothesis of this study was that providing calves with simple nutritional...

A survey was conducted regarding zebrafish Danio rerio use for scientific research with a focus on: anaesthesia and euthanasia; housing and husbandry; breeding and production; refinement opportunities. A total of 98 survey responses were received...

The aim of this study was to investigate the activity patterns of American mink (Neovison vison). Twenty mink from a commercial mink farm were housed in a free-range enclosure (290 m2) at the age of...

The act of grooming has been found to greatly decrease stress, heart rate, and cortisol levels in nonhuman primates; this decrease in stress and cortisol is seen in the animal being groomed, as well as...

Excessive weight gain and obesity is becoming a more frequent problem affecting captive lemurs. Animals have evolved to survive in specific environments, causing them to perform species-specific behaviours which animals are highly motivated to perform...

In June 2006 a loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) was admitted to a rescue centre on the Mediterranean coast with severe fishing net entanglement in its fore right flipper. The flipper could not be saved...

Primates are highly social animals and appropriate enrichment is required to ensure their psychological well-being. Mirrors are sometimes used as social or sensory environmental enrichment. In this paper we investigate the suitability of mirrors as...

There are few studies of long-term care and rehabilitation of animals which acquired physical disabilities in captivity, despite their importance for welfare. An adult male chimpanzee named Reo at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto...

In this study, we evaluated the potential for a behavioral research study, designed to evaluate chimpanzee decision‐making behavior, to also encourage increased activity in a group of zoo‐housed chimpanzees. For the behavioral study, the chimpanzees...

Recently environmental enrichment for laboratory housed fish has received increasing levels of attention from a variety of interested parties from hobbyists, through animal technologists and aquaculturists, to scientists. Over the last few years, the growth...

This poster is based on welfare improvements gained from group housing rabbits in floor pens in the new Antibody Production Facility with a focus on development, behaviours and environmental enrichment in both male and female...

Monkeys first arrived in the Comparative Biology Centre (CBC) at Newcastle University in 2000. They were housed in three small separate units consisting of steel and wooden cages. In 2011 a decision was made to...

All non-human great apes are endangered, and for these animals, captive individuals play an important role in the species’ conservation management plan. Therefore, information about their current enrichment activities is essential for maintaining a healthy...

Animal welfare is a high priority for pet owners and accredited zoos and aquariums. Current approaches to measuring welfare focus on identifying consensus among behavioral and physiological indicators of positive and negative emotions. Environmental enrichment...

Staggering food availability through a delivery device is a common way of providing behavioural enrichment as it is usually thought to increase the amount of natural behaviour due to the unpredictability of the food source...

The objective of the study was to investigate if environmental enrichment and the composition of the social group would affect the behavior and relative brain weight of growing rabbits. Rabbits (72 males and 72 females)...

The aims of this study were to investigate whether farmed mink use swimming basins as an environmental enrichment factor and to identify layouts suitable to allow mink to perform their characteristic behavior to a large...

There is an increasing amount of consideration being paid to cattle welfare and enrichment, both at agricultural research institutions and via welfare audits on commercial operations. A crucial element of these welfare and enrichment evaluations...

Cognitively challenging environments are vital to the welfare of captive animals. However, practical enrichment devices that can facilitate animals’ natural behaviours and accommodate individual variation are still limited. We created two types of feeders to...

Environmental enrichment provides laboratory-housed species the opportunity to express natural behavior and exert control over their home environment, thereby minimizing stress. We sought to determine whether providing an artificial plant in the holding tank as...

Sexually mature zebrafish were housed as single male-female pairs with or without plastic vegetation for 1, 5, or 10 d for comparison of whole-body cortisol measured by radioimmunoassay. Individually housed male zebrafish were used as...

The study of laboratory animal behavior has increased steadily over the last decade, with expanding emphasis on a variety of commonly used species. In the United States, this trend was initially focused on species for...

The inhibitory avoidance paradigm allows the study of mechanisms underlying learning and memory formation in zebrafish (Danio rerio Hamilton). For zebrafish, the physiology and behavior associated with this paradigm are as yet poorly understood. We...

Three decades ago, the Animal Welfare Act was amended to require researchers to provide environments that promoted the psychological, as well as the physical, wellbeing of nonhuman primates maintained for research purposes. We developed a...