Behavior, epigenetics and animal constraint topic of Feb. 18 seminar
Garet Lahvis, associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University, will present the seminar "Behavior, Epigenetics, and the Inescapable Problem of Animal Constraint," Feb. 18, 2019, in VBS 145 at 4 p.m.
Abstract
A half-century of studies show that laboratory animals raised in standard cages have reduced resiliency to experimental manipulations. They are not healthy. ‘Enrichment’ of cage conditions has been interpreted as a possible treatment because animals in these environments are healthier. However, these cages are only a few fold larger than standard cages and should be considered less aversive, not enriched. The area of a standard cage is exceeded by a mouse’s natural home range by 280,000 fold. For a rhesus macaque, natural ranges exceed the area of a standard cage by several million-fold. These constraints do not solve the reproducibility crisis and substantially impair the predictive power of lab animal research for human mental health and its downstream influences on cancer, cardiovascular disease, and protection from infections and wounds. Laboratory cages also fail to provide temporal variation: no dawn and dusk, no cold and heat, no opportunities to extract resources from a dynamic environment, as with food ripening and in decay. Without these variations, caged animals lack a natural breadth and depth of emotional experience: anticipation, fear, reward, pain, satiety, social reward and adversity. Suggested alternatives include much larger spaces for lab animals to roam and to author their experiences in the context of daily variations in food quality and environmental conditions.
