Question: What type of things do you do to benefit animal welfare and have any of them worked?

Joanna Cruden answered on 16 Jun 2012:

Hello Gabbie3, good question and I have tried some bits and I hope all of them have worked, the types of things I have tried is to show and train people how to handle rats and rabbits in a confident, consistent and considerate way, this has improved the attitude of the animals’ to being picked up.

I have run behaviour tests to determine the best environment to keep ferrets in when they are being used by giving them a choice of environment and working out which one they used the most. This worked because the ferrets were much more confident and playful in an enriched environment that the barren environment they would have been living in if I had not been able to demonstrate the differences.

I have done something similar for rats and nesting, in that I have shown they have a strong preference for nesting and when it goes in the cages they will use it, and they do use it!

I also completed a big study on mouse environments to determine which one they seemed to thrive in and this has helped many people make more informed decisions about how they are going to keep mice.

I am now starting to work with rabbits and aim to do similar tests with them to see what they need to have a good quality of life in the laboratory but I have not really got any interesting or firm results from this yet.

I am sure there are some that did not work but I don’t remember them except there was at least one I do remember that did not work, it was called a rat jolly ball and it was a ball with 3 holes in it that the rats could roll and stick their heads in and chew but the rats got their heads stuck in it and so we could not use it for rats but we did use it for mice 🙂

I am always looking for new ideas and trying to improve the welfare of the animals, I guess sometimes they don’t work but up until this point they seem to work.

While I have summed these up in a short time they actually took several months to investigate and study before I could say they had worked. The data collected is all statistically analysed to give more weight to the suggested housing and enrichment.