Voluntary Oral Ingestion of a Sedative Prior to Euthanasia with CO2: Behavioural Responses of Mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Laboratory mice are commonly euthanised with carbon dioxide (CO2); however, there is ample evidence that this gas is aversive. Previous work suggests that sedation achieved via injection with benzodiazepines prior to CO2 administration could reduce aversive behaviours during euthanasia. We explored the potential of using a voluntarily ingested sedative (tiletamine-zolazepam, Zoletil®) prior to euthanasia. Male and female C57BL/6 mice were allocated into one of the five experimental groups, which differed in the dose of Zoletil: 0, 10, 20, 40, 80 or 100 mg/kg. A dose of 20 mg/kg was found to achieve mild sedation prior to euthanasia; mice which received this dose numerically reared and walked on the cage lid less, and showed ataxia, immobility and recumbency for longer than mice that received a lower dose. During euthanasia, mice that received 20 mg/kg showed fewer aversive responses to CO2. Doses of 40 to 100 mg/kg were associated with signs of moderate to severe sedation, but resulted in an incomplete intake of the sedative, which made the interpretation of the aversiveness to CO2 difficult. Voluntary oral administration of a sedative is an effective, affordable, and easy way to minimize the stress of mice to euthanasia with CO2.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".