Conventional husbandry and the welfare of laboratory mice: assessing and alleviating negative emotions, pessimistic moods, and cumulative stress

我的计划的这个阶段将调查积极的动物福利如何促进恢复力和长寿，健康的生活。我的愿景是全面了解积极和消极事件如何影响压力反应，行为正常和身体健康：改变我们如何评估和改善农场，实验室和动物园动物舍。 对于全球数十亿动物来说，住房包括具有成本效益的小型围栏，但几乎没有提供活动或刺激的机会。但是，正如大流行封锁所揭示的那样，这种限制可能会在压力和心理健康方面付出代价。例如，小鼠是生物医学研究中使用最广泛的脊椎动物，它们有很高的动力去进行许多在传统实验室“鞋盒”笼子里不可能进行的自然行为，甚至推着比它们自身更重的重物进入“富含”资源的笼子，以进行这种活动。此外，与生活在高度富集的围栏中的那些相比，传统住房中的雌性小鼠对它们的笼友具有攻击性，在判断偏差的认知任务中“悲观”，对急性应激源的反应更强烈，容易出现异常行为，如重复刻板的路线追踪，并且寿命更短。因此，丰富的住房不仅能减少挫折感：还能增加积极的社会互动、抗压能力和寿命。 因此，为了激发实际的改变，我将使用小鼠作为模型和福利增强研究的有价值的目标，以调查荒芜的住房系统是否会使动物抑郁;大脑中出现了什么问题，从而产生刻板行为;什么是丰富住房的最佳方法;丰富的住房如何增强压力弹性;以及为什么满足感促进长寿，健康的生活。为了做到这一点，一系列的实验和数据荟萃分析将最终在一个独特的雄心勃勃的出生到衰老的研究，以评估高/低饲养压力的终身累积效应。这项工作将测试有关情绪状态如何影响情绪的基本假设;情绪如何影响压力弹性;以及终身情绪和弹性对身心健康的累积影响。它将为改善研究小鼠的饲养提供实用的建议，并提出创造性的新方法来减少侵入性，痛苦的研究程序的危害。这可能会为加拿大制定世界领先的实验室动物护理标准;并改善全球每年使用的1000万研究啮齿动物的福祉（甚至可能提高其研究数据的有效性）。由于小鼠是其他物种福利问题的重要模型，其研究结果也将使数百名应用动物行为学家，福利科学家和兽医受益，这些动物行为学家，福利科学家和兽医致力于评估和改善其他管理物种的福利，通过解决几十年来的福利难题（例如刻板行为的病因学）以及量化良好/不良住房的累积心理和身体健康影响。

This stage of my program will investigate how positive animal welfare promotes resilience and a long, healthy life. My vision is a comprehensive understanding of how positive and negative events affect stress reactivity, behavioural normalcy and physical health: one that transforms how we assess and improve farm, laboratory and zoo animal housing. For billions of animals globally, housing comprises small enclosures that are cost-effective, yet provide little opportunity for activity or stimulation. But -- as pandemic lockdowns so revealed -- such restrictions can have a cost, in terms of stress and mental health. For example mice, the most widely used vertebrate in biomedical research, are highly motivated to perform many natural behaviours impossible in conventional laboratory `shoebox' cages, even pushing weights heavier than themselves to access cages `enriched' with resources allowing such activities. Furthermore, compared to those living in highly enriched enclosures, female mice in conventional housing are aggressive to their cagemates, 'pessimistic' in cognitive tasks for Judgement Bias, more reactive to acute stressors, prone to abnormal behaviours like repetitive stereotypic route-tracing, and shorter lived. Enriched housing thus does not just reduce frustration: it increases positive social interactions, stress-resilience and lifespan. To inspire practical change, I will therefore use mice, both as a model and worthy target for welfare-enhancing research, to investigate whether barren housing systems make animals depressed; what goes wrong within the brain to generate stereotypic behaviours; what the best ways are to enrich housing; how enriched housing can enhance stress resilience; and why contentment promotes a long, healthy life. To do this, a series of experiments and data meta-analyses will culminate in a uniquely ambitious birth-to-senescence study to assess the lifetime cumulative effects of high/low husbandry stress. This work will test fundamental hypotheses about how emotional states influence moods; how moods affect stress resilience; and the cumulative effects of lifelong moods and resilience on physical and mental health. It will generate practical recommendations for improved husbandry of research mice, and suggest creative new ways to reduce the harms of invasive, painful research procedures. This could generate world-leading lab animal care standards for Canada; and improve well-being for 10s of millions of research rodents used globally p.a (maybe even improving the validity of their research data). Since mice are great models for welfare issues in other species, its findings will also benefit hundreds of applied ethologists, welfare scientists and veterinarians striving to assess and improve welfare in other managed species, by solving some decades old welfare puzzles (such as the aetiology of stereotypic behaviour) and by quantifying the cumulative mental and physical health impacts of good/poor housing.