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A checklist for good practice when caring for rodents in the laboratory.
In part due to a heightened awareness among the general public, and along with a global community of passionate ethologists and investigators concerned with animal welfare, this year the European Union (EU) legislated that, in law, animals are sentient beings. Globally, it raised awareness as well about the number of animals in use and the overall benefit of the animal studies.
The media are interested and the general milieu is one of guidelines and regulation. In many countries one must demonstrate in comprehensive project proposals the case for using animals and the methods that will keep animal suffering to the strict minimum. Most people define welfare this way: a state of balance between positive and negative experiences similar to those of the animals’ wild counterparts1.
It is encouraging, too, that guidelines for reporting out to professional journals—guidelines such as the ARRIVE Guidelines from NC3Rs2—have been powerful in drawing attention to treatment of animals used in research. The ARRIVE Guidelines are explicit as well as voluntary, calling on biomedical investigators to report details of design, experimental procedures, animals, housing, husbandry, sample size, allocation of animals to experimental groups, experimental outcomes, and statistical methods. And, reports of results, they say, must include baseline data, numbers analysed, outcomes and estimation, and adverse effects. In the UK, prominent groups have subscribed to the Guidelines and no doubt the culture will migrate. In other words, it’s impolitic to ignore the Guidelines though often inconvenient to subscribe to them, and the result is— when it comes to the welfare of animals in research—there’s nowhere to hide.
What’s important here? Animal welfare has taken its rightful place as a pivotal element in the design of biomedical investigations. All we’ve learned about the impact of emotion and environment on human health and well-being, learning, and memory will now influence, and in some places define, the way investigators and technicians manage non-human animals in research. With everything from housing to handling called into question, it would seem the industry may be in for an overhaul.
We were delighted, then, when ALN World™ invited us to set out a checklist for good practice, summarising what we know about how to provide for a rodent’s needs. What a very great pleasure indeed. We hope the items will become the animal welfare baseline for rodent care as well as a template for addressing needs of other animals in captivity for research.
OVERVIEW
Ideally the animal should feel secure in a complex, challenging, predictable environment that it can control. To help the animal achieve a sense of security, provide nestable, manipulable, and effective material plus hiding places and compatible cage mates.