Modulation of Aggression in Male Mice: Influence of Cage Cleaning Regime and Scent Marks
By P. Loo, C. Kruitwagen, L. V. Zutphen, J. Koolhaas, V. Baumans. Animal Welfare, 2000
123 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Group housing of male laboratory mice often leads to welfare problems due to aggressive behaviour. From a welfare perspective, individual housing is not a preferred solution to these problems - and so we sought other ways of reducing aggression between male mice. Aggression peaks after disturbances such as cage cleaning. Transfer of olfactory cues during cage cleaning procedures has been repeatedly proposed as a means of reducing these peaks in aggression. In this study, the aggression-modulating properties of olfactory cues were studied by investigating the effects of their source and distribution on aggression after cage cleaning in groups of male BALB/c mice. The physiological effects of aggression on individuals within a group were also monitored.Our results indicated that neither kinship nor distribution of urine marks affected aggression. Olfactory cues from nesting and bedding material, however, affected aggression to a marked degree: transfer of nesting material reduced aggression significantly, while transfer of sawdust containing urine and faeces seemed to intensify aggression. None of the physiological data revealed any differences between dominant and subordinate animals, nor any correlations with aggressiveness, except that dominant animals gained weight more rapidly than subordinate ones. We conclude that the transfer of nesting material will reduce aggression, or at least slow down its development, and thus aid the reduction of social tension due to cage cleaning.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Small Animals, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c33780ce73e8c95a3d239890b34f4b76e0ba373f
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Small Animals
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- What is it like to be a rat? Rat sensory perception and its implications for experimental design and rat welfare (2008, background): “…601 602 603 604 605 606 607 This said, while cage-cleaning – which removes scent marks – provokes aggression in male mice (Gray & Hurst, 1995; Van Loo et al., 2000), in familiar rats it merely provokes non-aggressive skirmishing (Burn et al., 2006a; Burn et al., 2006b); perhaps for this…”
- More than numbers matter: the effect of social factors on behaviour and welfare of laboratory rodents and non-human primates (2007, background): “Results are 595 conflicting as regards whether to exchange all or only parts of the substrate (e. g. 596 McGregor and Ayling, 1990; Gray and Hurst, 1995), but van Loo et al. (2000) found 597 that transferring nesting material from the soiled to the clean cage clearly reduced 598 aggression.”
- Sources of stress in captivity (2007, background): “Removing scent marks has been shown to increase aggression among group-housed mice, as does the transfer of bedding from a novel cage of conspecifics (van Loo et al., 2000).”
- Understanding behaviour: the relevance of ethological approaches in laboratory animal science (2003, background): “To reduce aggression, it has been recommended that mice be transferred into completely clean cages with fresh bedding (see Jennings et al., 1998 ), or that nest materials are also transferred as these contain aggression-reducing olfactory cues (Van Loo et al., 2000).”