The 2011 Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals contains recommendations regarding the amount of cage space for mothers with litters. Literature on cage-space use in breeding rats is sparse. We hypothesized that...
Prevention or alleviation of pain in laboratory mice is a fundamental requirement of in vivoresearch. The mouse grimace scale (MGS) has the potential to be an effective and rapid means of assessing pain and analgesic...
Guinea pig pups produce typical distress whistles when isolated. Whistles’ frequency is decreased or abolished when they contact with the mother and, to a lesser degree, a sibling or even an unfamiliar female, is regained...
Research has indicated that witnessing managemental procedures are stressful to laboratory rats. Yet there has been little investigation into whether the time of witnessing these procedures affects behaviour and welfare in these animals. Ninety-six rats...
An unfavourable yet necessary side-effect of stereotaxic surgery involves the social isolation of post-surgery rats, in order to protect their wound site or skull-mounted implant from damage. Social isolation can cause a myriad of behavioural...
Mice are used extensively in physiological research. Automated home‐cage systems have been developed to study single‐housed animals. Increased stress by different housing conditions might affect greatly the results when investigating metabolic responses. Urinary corticosteroid concentration...
The early postnatal period is a sensitive period in rodents as behavioural systems are developing and maturing during this time. However, relatively little information is available about the impact of environmental enrichment on offspring behaviour...
Welfare problems in laboratory mice can be a consequence of an ongoing experiment, or a characteristic of a particular genetic line, but in some cases, such as breeding animals, they are most likely to be...
Light is the principal synchronizing environmental factor for the biological clock. Light quantity (intensity), and light quality (type of light source) can have different effects. The aim of this study was to determine the effects...
Cognitive processes are influenced by underlying affective states, and tests of cognitive bias have recently been developed to assess the valence of affective states in animals. These tests are based on the fact that individuals...