The epidemiology of fighting in group-housed laboratory mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Injurious home-cage aggression (fighting) in mice affects both animal welfare and scientific validity. It is arguably the most common potentially preventable morbidity in mouse facilities. Existing literature on mouse aggression almost exclusively examines territorial aggression induced by introducing a stimulus mouse into the home-cage of a singly housed mouse (i.e. the resident/intruder test). However, fighting occurring in mice living together in long-term groups under standard laboratory housing conditions has barely been studied. We performed a point-prevalence epidemiological survey of fighting at a research institution with an approximate 60,000 cage census. A subset of cages was sampled over the course of a year and factors potentially influencing home-cage fighting were recorded. Fighting was almost exclusively seen in group-housed male mice. Approximately 14% of group-housed male cages were observed with fighting animals in brief behavioral observations, but only 14% of those cages with fighting had skin injuries observable from cage-side. Thus simple cage-side checks may be missing the majority of fighting mice. Housing system (the combination of cage ventilation and bedding type), genetic background, time of year, cage location on the rack, and rack orientation in the room were significant risk factors predicting fighting. Of these predictors, only bedding type is easily manipulated to mitigate fighting. Cage ventilation and rack orientation often cannot be changed in modern vivaria, as they are baked in by cookie-cutter architectural approaches to facility design. This study emphasizes the need to invest in assessing the welfare costs of new housing and husbandry systems before implementing them.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".