It is widely recommended to group-house male laboratory mice because they are ‘social animals’, but male mice do not naturally share territories and aggression can be a serious welfare problem. Even without aggression, not all...
Animal welfare requires the adequate housing of animals to ensure health and well-being. The application of environmental enrichment is a way to improve the well-being of laboratory animals. However, it is important to know whether...
The incidence of obesity is on the rise in most western countries and represents major risks to health. Obesity causes complex metabolic dysfunctions and can be associated with a large number of secondary diseases. To...
Providing adequate analgesia while minimizing handling and stress post-surgery can be challenging. Recently, there have been commercial products made available for providing long acting analgesia in rodents. However, we find there are limitations for use...
Euthanasia protocols are designed to mitigate the stress experienced by animals, and an environment that induces minimal stress helps achieve that goal. A protocol that is efficient and practical in a typical animal research facility...
Aggression is a major welfare issue in mice, particularly when mice unfamiliar to each other are first placed in cages, as happens on receipt from a vendor, and following cage cleaning. Injuries from aggression are...
Group housing is highly important for social animals. However, it can also give rise to aggression, one of the most serious welfare concerns in laboratory mouse husbandry. Severe fighting can lead to pain, injury and...
The poor record of basic-to-clinical translation in recent decades has led to speculation that preclinical research is “irreproducible”, and this irreproducibility in turn has largely been attributed to deficiencies in reporting and statistical practices. There...
This review highlights selected effects of untreated pain and of widely used analgesics such as opioids, non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs and antipyretics, to illustrate the relevance of carefully planned, appropriate and controlled analgesia for greater reproducibility...
In animal models, blood pressure measurement methods can be either invasive (direct) or non-invasive (indirect). The non-invasive alternative involves applying a tail-cuff for blood pressure measurement. Current standardized restraint methods involve confining the laboratory animal...