Risk factors for barbering in laboratory mice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Barbering is a common abnormal behavior in laboratory mice, where mice pluck their own fur and/or the fur or whiskers of their cage mates. Barbering mice are a concern for welfare and research quality, as well as serving as a spontaneous model of trichotillomania (a hair-pulling disorder in humans). Causes and prevention of barbering are poorly understood, although there is evidence that both biological and environmental factors play a role in its prevalence. Since initial work in this area was done 20 years ago, mouse husbandry has changed dramatically. We provide an updated analysis of risk factors for barbering in laboratory mice based on point prevalence of hair loss in 2544 cages over one year (7007 mice). We analyzed the effects of biological, environmental, and husbandry factors that are known to be stressors for mice. We found that certain risk factors for barbering, such as sex and breeding status, have persisted despite changes in housing. We additionally identified differences in prevalence based on genetic background, housing system, time of year, and a "hotspot" effect showing spatial clustering of barbering. Our findings can be used to increase understanding of this behavior and to inform changes in husbandry to reduce its prevalence.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".