The Guide for the Care and Use of Animals and the USDA Animal Welfare Regulations (AWR) outline minimum space requirements for laboratory animals, including rabbits. These documents encourage housing of animals in enclosures that allow...
The RSPCA/UFAW Rodent Welfare Group holds a one-day meeting every autumn so that its members can discuss current welfare research, exchange views on rodent welfare issues and share experiences of the implementation of the 3Rs...
Routine laboratory procedures can be stressful for laboratory animals. We wanted to determine whether human handling of adult rabbits could induce a degree of habituation, reducing stress and facilitating research-related manipulation. To this end, adult...
The primary goal of environmental enrichment should be the avoidance of abnormal behaviors in laboratory animals such as rodents, lagomorphs, dogs, cats, and nonhuman primates. A total of 13 male single-housed New Zealand White rabbits...
The concentration of glucocorticoid metabolites (GCM) in rabbit faeces has been suggested as a non-invasive indicator of stress. In the present study, GCM concentrations were measured in faeces of fattening rabbits kept in groups of...
The aim of this study was to evaluate different experimental gnawing blocks as cage enrichment in rabbits. One hundred and five pregnant rabbit does housed in conventional wire cages were distributed according to their parity...
Since we receive rabbits at 10-12 weeks of age and we only house them for about 3 to 4 weeks, we decided to give group housing a try. Change is hard for most people and...
Environmental enrichment can be defined as altering the living environment of captive animals in order to provide them with opportunities to express more of their natural behavioral repertoire. The challenge of providing effective enrichment in...
On Swiss rabbit breeding farms, group-housed does are usually kept singly for 12 days around parturition to avoid pseudogravidity, double litters and deleterious fighting for nests. After this isolation phase there is usually an integration...
The main objective of the program of research, of which this study is part, is to evaluate the housing and environmental enrichment for laboratory rabbits. The aim is to determine whether modifications to basic housing...