Optimize Your Deal Pipeline Management for Animal science with airSlate SignNow

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my research aims to understand behavioral strategies in mammals so we can improve management and welfare as well as conservation in natural habitats much of the work that we do focuses on wild rodents although we also use laboratory mice and rats as models providing greater genetic control we set up some super facilities here at the University of Liverpool Lee Hurst campus to study rodent behavior which goes right away from very controlled bio essays in small arenas all the way to big outdoor enclosures where we can study much more naturalistic behavior but to see natural behavior in these animals it's really important to ensure that they're not stressed or anxious that not only is that bad for their welfare but it's a huge interference in the behavior we're trying to measure I have noticed that laboratory mice that seem to be particularly anxious and susceptible to handling stress while watching them I thought that this might be due to the standard way that everyone handled these animals which is to pick them up by the base of the tail and then rest their body weight on a surface like the handlers arm but even then these mice really try and pull away from the handler and often try to bite but you can also pick up laboratory mice by simply scooping them up on the open hand once they're familiar with handling our research has shown that either tunnel or cap handling considerably reduces the stress and anxiety of the mice we've used a number of different measures and they all say the same thing which is that tail handling is aversive to mice and induces much more stress and anxiety than tunnel or cap handling other labs have now repeated many of the tests we've done as is seeing the same thing which shows how general this response appears to be so this doesn't just impact on the animals welfare it also has a big impact on the reliability of mice in behavioral testing when we take our meals out of the home cage those picked up by the tail are much more cautious and don't explore normally so they're not interacting properly with the test environment animals picked up by top tunnel are much bolder and explore normally so we're measuring their natural behavior rather than their response to being humbled this small changing picking up the mice leads to a much more reliable and relevant test responses we've been conducting further research into the practicalities of implementing these non aversive methods in place of traditional tail handling and we've been working with NC 3 ours on promoting their implementation across animal facilities the great news is that you can see the benefits of tumble handling even if you only handle the animals really briefly and you can still restrain the animals either by the tail or by scruff once you've picked the animals up what our data shows is that the thing that people need to avoid is capturing and picking up mice by the tail the animal facilities here in Liverpool have really led the way in showing the practicalities of using these methods in place of tail handling and it's great to see that other facilities are now rolling this out in seeing the benefits for themselves and for their animals to help people with trying to implement this we've put together a tutorial some FA cues and other resources on the NC three our website more mice are used in research around the world than any other vertebrate so this small change could improve the welfare of many millions of animals as well as improving the quality of the research data so far we've looked at this in the context of behavioral testing but many areas of research are confounded by background stress that needs to be avoided so I do think that this handling refinement could have much wider scientific benefits across a wide range of research