Severity assessment using a choice-based relative ranking system

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Invasive basic neuroscience research with rhesus monkeys is a cornerstone of systems and cognitive neuroscience. It also belongs to those areas of animal research generating substantial public interest in the animals’ welfare and the severity of the procedures.The goal of this project is to complement and extend the behavioural and physiological approaches for welfare assessment in non-human primates (rhesus monkeys) that we are developing and applying in our laboratory with choice-based preference testing to rate the relative subjective severity of a variety of different aspects of experimental procedures and the animals’ housing and social conditions.Incorporating the monkey’s individual perspective into the assessment of welfare provides critical information about the animal’s subjective experience (if not the only relevant information), something that is currently missing in all available welfare scoring systems. Within the first funding period, we have designed and established the applicability of a preference test based on individual animals’ choices, applied the phenomenon of attentional bias to measure changes in emotional state as a result of prolonged anesthesia, adjusted a non-invasive, indirect heart rate measure (photoplethysmography) for its use in rhesus macaques, and investigated infrared thermography as non-invasive tool for wound monitoring. In the second funding period, we aim to apply the developed methodologies placing a multitude of experimental procedures into a common ranking scale and to cross-validate the monkeys’ behavioural choices with non-invasive measures of physiological stress responses. Additionally, we will investigate the validity of infrared thermography as a suitable method for predicting inflammation. The outcomes of this projects will enable us to focus our future animal welfare refinement efforts to those procedures that are perceived as most severe by our monkeys.