Environmental Enrichment

Includes structural, behavioral, food, and auditory enrichment.

Taylor, P. S., Schrobback, P., Verdon, M. et al. 2023. An effective environmental enrichment framework for the continual improvement of production animal welfare. Animal Welfare 32, e14.

Substrates and objects are provided to farm animals on the assumption that they improve animal welfare by enriching the environment, but these often fail to consider the extent to which an environmental enrichment (EE) improves...

Matthews, B., New, R., Kanse, Y. M. et al. 2023. Cooped up: Refinement of a Gallus gallus domesticus environment. Animal Technology and Welfare 22(3), 228–230.

Providing an enriched species specific environment, coupled with the principles of the 3Rs (Refinement, Reduction and Replacement) is at the heart of the poulty team team at The Pirbright Institute. Periodically reviwed custom made cage...

Hickman, M., Miller, L., MacDonald, R. 2023. An assessment of rat hammocks as enrichment. Animal Technology and Welfare 22(3), 221–223.

Research has shown there are numerous welfare and scientific benefits to housing rats in more enriched and environmentally complex housing opposed to conventional housing. With the aim of increasing environmental complexity, providing opportunities for climbing...

Amendola, L., Xu, N., Weary, D. M. 2023. Rats move nesting materials to create different functional areas: Short report. Laboratory Animals 57(1), 75–78.

Here we document how rats separate their living space into different functional regions. Five groups of four female Sprague Dawley rats were housed in caging systems that consisted of two standard cages connected by a...

Abou-Ismail, U. A., Mendl, M. T. 2016. The effects of enrichment novelty versus complexity in cages of group-housed rats (Rattus norvegicus). Applied Animal Behaviour Science 180, 130-139.

Although experimental work on environmental enrichment has answered many important questions, it is not yet known whether beneficial effects of enrichment are more strongly influenced by regular provision of novel objects, or by the diversity...

Whitbread, S. 2022. Some observations on the use of transparent barriers. RATEL (Journal of the Association of British and Irish Wild Animal Keepers) 49(3), 9-13.

What follows are some case studies in which solid but transparent barriers have been used successfully to provide a sense of security to three different mammal taxa (three-banded armadillo; Kirk’s dikdik; black rat) to reduce...

LaFollette, M. R., Cloutier, S., Brady, C. M. et al. 2023. Benchmarking enrichment efforts in the US & Canada across species and enrichment categories. JAALAS 62(4), 303–316.

Enrichment is important for animal welfare and data quality. Provision of enrichment opportunities varies between species and enrichment category. However, data benchmarking these differences does not exist. Our objective was to characterize enrichment provision and...

Zhao, S., Zhang, R., Li, C. et al. 2023. The effect of short-term classical music stimulus on behavior and tonic immobility reaction of pullets. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 26(3), 386–392.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of short-term stimulation of classical music on the behavior of pullets and to explore whether classical music as an auditory enrichment factor reduces the fear...

Xu, L., Jiao, M., Cui, Z.-L. et al. 2023. Enriched environment during adolescence modulates lipid metabolism and emotion-related behaviors in mice. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 26(2), 218–228.

Enriched environment (EE) is an important animal experimental paradigm to decipher gene-environment interaction. It is thought to be efficient in aiding recovery from certain metabolism disorders or cognitive impairments. Recently, the effects of EE during...

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