Josie Glausiusz praises biologists who are “designing gentler ways of handling lab mice”:
[Biologist Jane] Hurst found that mice allowed to walk into a clear plastic tunnel—which the handler then lifts, without direct contact with the animal—experience much less anxiety than mice grabbed by the tail. They spend more time interacting with their handler: sniffing, crawling, and peeking inside the tunnel. And they are more likely to enter the open-ended arm of a maze, a standard test of anxiety in lab mice. The decrease in anxiety occurs if they are picked up in a tunnel that is always present in their cage or in a newly introduced tunnel. (Overall, though, they prefer a familiar tunnel.)
Why it matters to scientific progress:
Long-term, recurrent anxiety in mice can have profound effects on experiments designed to test drugs, say, intended for treating anxiety and depression in humans. “If experiments require animals to be anxious (for example, tests of anti-anxiety drugs where we need to see if these reduce anxiety), there could be an advantage in deliberately using tail handling to stimulate background anxiety in the test animals,” Hurst says. But in other areas of research—especially behavioral studies—anxiety in lab mice may compromise results, either because the animal may not show an expected response, or because high anxiety may amplify their reactions.
Update from a reader:
I spent four years working as an animal care technician at the University of Colorado Denver, so I’ve grabbed an awful lot of mouse tails. The post you linked to is neat and all, but it doesn’t address the real problems in the animal care industry.
While it’s true that most researchers don’t much care about animal welfare (or anything else not directly related to their current project; they’re very focused), there are enough people in the industry who do that such issues do get addressed. The real problems are scale and cost.
The facility I worked at had capacity for over 20,000 mouse and rat cages. When I worked there, we were hovering around 10,000. Since we used mechanically ventilated cages rather than static caging, each caging had to be changed every two weeks per NIH requirements. Each technician had a cage load of 100-150 cages per day, which, I was told, is fairly low for the industry. Each of those cages we had to change could have between 1 to 5 mice in it (discounting breeders with litters.), so you’re looking at grabbing, we’ll say 300-400 mouse tails per day on average. You’ll have to trust me when I say that there simply isn’t time to politely usher three or four hundred mice a day into a nice comfortable tube.
Just like in factory farming, changing procedures for greater animal welfare would involve massive increases in costs. Researchers would be against it due to that alone. Most technicians would also probably be against such changes, since no matter how management modified their expectations, I guarantee you they would still be too high. (The drive for cost savings results in lousy human welfare as well as animal welfare, and I was never so happy as when I finally quit that job.)
Grabbing the mice by the tail is the fastest way you can easily catch them, and until the cost issues are confronted directly, it’s going to be extremely difficult to bring in gentler methods.
The Dish 