COST Action B-24 established four working groups to research and discuss issues relevant to laboratory animal science. These included the housing of animals, environmental needs, refinement of procedures, genetically modified animals, and cost-benefit analysis. Based...
Handling experience (which includes routine maintenance) can have positive or negative effects on stress responses that influence experiments, depending on the animals' experience during handling. The most common method used to capture and handle laboratory...
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has been reported to play important roles in the modulation of anxiety, mood stabilizers, and pathophysiology of affective disorders. Recently, a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the BDNF gene (Val66Met) has...
In previous studies of environmental enrichment of mice it has been determined that certain types of mice are affected by manipulation of their living environment. Some have effects on cognitive memory and some affect the...
Stereotyped motor behaviors are a common consequence of environmental restriction in a wide variety of species. Although environmental enrichment has been shown to substantially reduce stereotypy levels, the various components of enrichment have not been...
The current study was performed to understand the level of sound produced by ventilated racks, animal transfer stations, and construction equipment that mice in ventilated cages hear relative to what humans would hear in the...
Our goal was to evaluate the effect of treatment represented by enrichment with cotton balls, and the housing system, by comparing the conventional (open cage) and the ventilated cage (IVC) systems on the weight gain...
Collection of blood from the submandibular vein allows simple and rapid processing of many animals without anesthesia and facilitates rapid recovery with no signs of pain and discomfort in the mice. Here we compared the...
We conclude that handling experimental animals more often than only at the time their cage is changes is beneficial.
For captive animals, living in barren conditions leads to stereotypic behaviour that is hard to alleviate using environmental enrichment. This resistance to enrichment is often explained via mechanisms that decouple abnormal behaviour from current welfare...