This book focuses primarily on human kindness and compassion rather than on human cruelty, callousness, indifference, and egocentric endeavors. It is common knowledge that many lay people and professional researchers treat animals in their charge...
As research subjects, cats have contributed substantially to our understanding of biological systems, from the development of mammalian visual pathways to the pathophysiology of feline immunodeficiency virus as a model for human immunodeficiency virus. Few...
The impact of operantly training domestic cats to accept jugular blood collections in a dorsally recumbent (novel) position was assessed. Cats were assigned to one of three groups: Group 1 (N = 14): no training...
Cats can be successfully housed in groups when given enough space in addition to sufficient feeding, elimination, and resting areas. Cats at the University of Rochester are utilized in vision research, and have titanium cranium...
This is the third volume of discussions that took place on the Laboratory Animal Refinement & Enrichment Forum (LAREF). This forum is dedicated to the exchange of personal experiences of refining the conditions under which...
Providing feed enrichment to captive felids that are obligate carnivores is crucial for eliciting natural hunting behaviours. However, studies of the efficacy of enrichment techniques usually analyse the whole group, overlooking the different behaviours of...
Social or group housing is well known as the ideal environment for maintaining cats in a research setting as it allows specific behaviors such as play, grooming, and climbing. When social housing is not possible...
Understanding environmental factors that affect the behavior of cats in cages is important if caretakers are to improve the welfare of confined cats. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of the...
Institutions are in a never-ending budget battle and items like environmental enrichment tend to get overshadowed. The challenge for laboratory animal technicians is to put on their thinking caps and find novel, low-cost enrichment items...
For infectious disease studies, assessment of feline health is traditionally limited to metrics such as body temperature (BT), change in body weight (BW), and clinical signs (CS). Recently, behavioral ethograms designed for assessment of rabbits...