Nesting material enrichment reduces severity of overgrooming-related self-injury in individually housed rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individual or singly-housing laboratory rats is common in many animal facilities, but has an adverse impact on the welfare of this social species. It has previously been shown that a small proportion of individually housed mice (∼5%) engage in pathological overgrooming behaviour, but this has not been assessed in rats. We performed an observational study to determine the prevalence of overgrooming-related self-injury and whether providing nesting material enrichment throughout an animal’s life would affect the prevalence or severity of overgrooming-related self-injury. Due to protocol differences between projects in our behavioural neuroscience lab, unenriched rats received a nylabone and a shelter ( n = 167), while baseline-enriched rats received a nylabone, shelter and shredded paper nesting material throughout experiments ( n = 238). Unenriched rats received nesting material enrichment after the onset of overgrooming-related self-injury. Over 18 months, rats were monitored by their experimenters on a daily basis (5–7 days/week over 2–3 months/project) and any cases of overgrooming-related self-injury were recorded. Replicating the findings of previous studies in mice, we observed 20 cases of overgrooming-related self-injury (∼5%) with no difference in prevalence between rats on the basis of supplier, cage position, experimental procedure (behavioural only or involving surgical procedures), reinforcer (ethanol or sugar) or level of baseline-enrichment. While there was no difference in onset severity between rats that were unenriched at baseline and baseline-enriched rats, baseline-enriched rats had lower self-injury severity scores at one-, two- and four-week follow-ups. These results suggest that nesting material enrichment provided throughout an animal’s life may reduce overgrooming-related self-injury.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".