The amount of cage bedding preferred by female BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice

Abstract

In order to improve the welfare of laboratory mice, a number of different environmental enrichment strategies have been developed to provide opportunities for mice to engage in naturalistic behaviors. Providing sufficient cage bedding for mice to use as a burrowing substrate could be considered an environmental enrichment strategy, but few studies have considered the welfare aspects of cage bedding amount. The authors compared the preferences of group-housed female BALB/c and C57BL/6 mice for three different volumes of cage bedding (0.5 l, 1.5 l and 6 l). Mice of both strains but especially C57BL/6 mice showed strong preferences for cages with more bedding. The results highlight the importance of providing a sufficient amount of cage bedding to laboratory mice.

Influence of Metabolic Cage on Wistar Rat Physiological State

“…We established a tendency of increasing water consumption by 14.07 % and decreasing of food consumption by 39.04 % when rats were housed for 336 hours in metabolic cages. Scientists indicated that consumption of water and food depends on the bedding material volume (19), but in our experiment bedding was not provided. According to Zymantiene J. et al…”

O mouse, where art thou? The Mouse Position Surveillance System (MoPSS) - an RFID based tracking system

“…one way sorting systems Baumans et al, 2002;Loo et al, 2005Blom et al, 1992Blom et al, 1996Krohn and Hansen, 2010Kawakami et al, 2007Ago et al, 2002Godbey et al, 2011Gaskill et al, 2009;Gaskill et al, 2011;Gaskill et al, 2012Kawakami et al, 2012Kirchner et al, 2012Freymann et al, 2015;Linnenbrink andv. Merten, 2017 Bains et al, 2016;Redfern et al, 2017;Endo et al, 2018;Chaumont et al, 2019Weissbrod et al, 2013Noldus et al, 2001Rao et al, 2019Nath et al, 2019…”

“…Animals are given continuous access to the options presented in each cage. In order to measure preference, either the nest position (Loo et al, 2005;Baumans et al, 2002) or the time the animals spent in the compartment (Godbey et al, 2011;Kawakami et al, 2012;Blom et al, 1992;Kirchner et al, 2012;Freymann et al, 2015;Freymann et al, 2017) is then monitored and regarded as the favored one (Habedank et al, 2018). Thus, home cage based preference tests are based on binary or multiple choices, and they are designed to rank the preferences, not to assess the strength of preference or the "demand" for this resource (Kirkden and Pajor, 2006).…”

“…Further husbandry conditions which to our knowledge are not yet fully investigated in this manner are, e.g., brightness, humidity and different items of enrichment such as structural elements or equipment for active engagement. When conducting a home cage based preference test, it can be distinguished between the active (dark) and the inactive (light) phase to analyse the data (Lewejohann and Sachser, 2000;Freymann et al, 2015). This is especially important if the tested cage conditions are predominantly associated with active (e.g., running wheel) or inactive behaviour (e.g., nesting material).…”

“…Similar problems would also arise if using digital scales below the cages combined with an automated tracking program (Krohn and Hansen, 2010). To combine automated and individual detection, telemetry can be used by either implanting a rather large, battery-powered transponder (Kawakami et al, 2012) or injecting a smaller, passive transponder for radio-frequency identification (RFID) (Kirchner et al, 2012;Freymann et al, 2015;Freymann et al, 2017). The latter method is also very commonly used not just for choice tests but to record general activity patterns of mice (Freund et al, 2013;Bains et al, 2016;Weissbrod et al, 2013;de Chaumont et al, 2019), rats (Redfern et al, 2017) and birds (Bridge et al, 2019).…”