Severity assessment using a choice-based relative ranking system

对恒河猴的侵入性基础神经科学研究是系统和认知神经科学的基石。它也属于那些对动物福利和程序的严重性产生重大公共利益的动物研究领域。该项目的目标是补充和扩展我们正在实验室开发和应用的非人类灵长类动物(恒河猴)的行为和生理福利评估方法，以基于选择的偏好测试来评估实验程序的各个不同方面的相对主观严重性以及动物的住房和社会条件。将猴子的个体视角纳入福利评估中提供了关于动物主观经验的关键信息(如果不是唯一的相关信息)，目前在所有可用的福利评分系统中都缺少的东西。在第一个资助期内，我们设计并建立了基于单个动物选择的偏好测试的适用性，应用注意偏差现象来测量由于长时间麻醉而导致的情绪状态的变化，调整了一种非侵入性的间接心率测量(光体积描记)用于恒河猴，并研究了红外热像仪作为非侵入性创伤监测工具的应用。在第二个资助期，我们的目标是应用开发的方法，将多种实验程序放在一个通用的排名表中，并用非侵入性的生理应激反应测量来交叉验证猴子的行为选择。此外，我们还将研究红外热像仪作为预测炎症的合适方法的有效性。这个项目的结果将使我们能够将我们未来的动物福利改进工作集中在那些被我们的猴子认为最严格的程序上。

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.