Includes structural, behavioral, food, and auditory enrichment.
Continued progress to move evidence-based best practices into community and regulatory animal welfare standards depends in part on developing common metrics to assess cost, benefit, and relative value. Here we describe a model approach to...
Environmental enrichment is a strategy to improve animal welfare, providing brain plasticity with changes at cellular, molecular and behavioral levels. In order to test the long-term effects of enriched housing and the importance of testosterone...
Current housing guidelines for laboratory rodents include recommendations for enrichment. Working with guinea pigs, we have developed an open-field enrichment paradigm that provides several aspects of this species' natural environment. These naturalistic aspects include access...
Feather pecking is a maladaptive behavior where chickens (and other poultry species) peck the feathers of conspecifics and damage the plumage and frequently the skin. It is one of the most common behavioral problems in...
Since 10 years, EU-legislation states that "pigs must have permanent access to sufficient quantity of material to enable proper investigation and manipulation activities." While much research has focused on which materials enable proper investigation and...
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...
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...
Huddling and nest building are two methods of behavioral thermoregulation used by mice under cold stress. In the laboratory, mice are typically housed at an ambient temperature (Ta) of 20°C, well below the lower end...
The beneficial effects of environment and social support during disease recovery in humans are widely accepted. Because laboratory mice are social animals and are highly motivated to interact with each other and with their environment...
Stereotypic behaviours (SBs) are linked with behavioural inflexibility and resemble symptoms of autism, suggesting that stereotypic animals could have autistic-like social impairments. SBs are also common in caged mice. We therefore hypothesised relationships between stereotypic...