Standard laboratory housing for mice restricts their ability to segregate space into clean and dirty areas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Laboratory mice (Mus musculus) are typically housed in simple cages consisting of one open space. These standard cages may thwart mouse ability to segregate resting areas from areas where they eliminate, a behaviour that is prevalent across the animal kingdom. No scientific work has directly tested whether mice engage in such segregation behaviour, or whether the ability to do so may have welfare consequences. Here we show that mice, whether housed in standard cages or a complex housing system consisting of three interconnected standard cages, kept nesting and elimination sites highly segregated, with nest and urine co-occurring in the same location only 2% of the time. However, mice in the complex system established these clean and dirty sites in separate cages instead of separate locations within one cage, and carried bedding materials (cellulose pellets) from their nesting cages to their latrine cage. Moreover, mice in the complex system displayed more behaviours associated with positive welfare and were less disturbed by weekly husbandry procedures. We conclude that mice find waste products aversive, and that housing mice in a way that facilitates spatial segregation provides a simple way of allowing the expression of natural behaviours and improving welfare.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".