Enrichment is pivotal to captive animal welfare. Social enrichment is particularly important for any social animals who, due to practical constraints, are not housed in larger groups. Pair housing is the most common social housing...

Enrichment—adding complexity to an animal’s environment—is an essential element of improving the lives of animals in captivity. Species-appropriate toys, puzzles, and structures, for example, can provide cognitive stimulation and opportunities to engage in natural behaviors...

Standard barren housing systems for laboratory mice restrict the expression of natural behaviors and are associated with a high incidence of abnormal behavior. There is abundant evidence that environmental enrichment has a positive impact on...

Barren colony cages are often used for housing of breeding and research quail, especially within laboratory animal housing systems. These systems provide for ease of care and the maintenance of strict laboratory hygiene requirements, but...

Fish can perform simple addition and subtraction, a study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports revealed (Schluessel et al., 2022). In a series of runs, cichlids and stingrays were first shown an image containing...

A court in Germany is investigating whether killing animals bred for labs but never used in research constitutes a crime, since German law forbids hurting animals without reasonable cause. According to a 2017 report by...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recently announced the provisional composition of an ad hoc committee that will examine the need, both current and future, for the use of nonhuman primates (NHPs)...

A federal court in Virginia has taken the extraordinary step of granting the Department of Justice a temporary restraining order against a facility in Cumberland, Virginia, that breeds and sells beagles for experimentation. The court...

Curiosity—the drive to gather information—is considered a fundamental motivation throughout the animal kingdom. As such, providing opportunities to satisfy that curiosity may be essential for animals to have good welfare in captivity. Fish are held...

Inter-male aggression in mice continues to challenge laboratory animal husbandry personnel, as intervention strategies are typically applied at the cage level without a good understanding of how individual behavior is affected. Aggression mitigation may be...