MacDuff, A., Loera, F., Adamson, T. W. 2019. Use of more naturalistic nesting material helps decrease food shredding in mice. Laboratory Animal Science Professional 7(1) (March), 46-48.

Shredding of feed (food grinding or food wasting) is a common behavior among certain strains of mice. It is seen in both captive and wild rodents and may either be an abnormal behavior or a normal behavior that is simply more noticeable in the cage setting. This behavior leads to wasting of feed, dirtier cages, and more frequent cage changing intervals (which requires extra labor/resources and results in increased handling and stress of the mice). We wanted to see if we could make any changes to our husbandry practices to decrease the incidence of food wasting in this colony. Our data indicate that brown crinkled paper with or without a Nestlet or Enrich-n’Nest allows F1 c/c strain and Bx c/c strain mice to build more complex nests. Brown crinkled paper alone also resulted in a significant decrease in shredding of the 5053 LabDiet used in this study.