Module 07 - Environmental Enrichment

As a start to this module, there is a short exercise to introduce some of the areas to be covered and to encourage the reader to think about how we keep experimental animals and where we might need to make improvements.  In this exercise, we will try to compare the well-being of a wild and a laboratory mouse, without delving too deeply into the husbandry or lives of either.  Let your own thoughts or perceptions about the two animals guide your answers.  There are no right or wrong answers but there may be some unexpected outcomes.  The scores are not important, as you will see in the commentary. 

Wild Mouse versus Laboratory Mouse

Measuring Well-being

One of the ways we can look at our treatment of laboratory animals is to compare them with their wild counterparts.  As background information and perhaps to introduce some bias, you should know that in the wild, mice live about three hundred days or so while outbred laboratory mice will live about six to seven hundred days.  If a young wild mouse is brought into the laboratory, it will live for about six hundred days or so.  Below, you are asked to compare the wild and laboratory mice using the Five Freedoms as set out by the UK Farm Animal Welfare Council.  The scale shown goes from minus 5 to plus 5 and should be used to indicate your idea of how each parameter affects the well-being of each mouse. 

Using a piece of paper, give a score for each mouse in each of the categories, either plus or minus.  You may feel that you do not know enough about either mouse to judge properly but you should allocate a score based on what you think each mouse experiences.  Consider the laboratory mice to be living in an animal facility and that they are not part of an experiment.

If you want to print off a paper copy of the following scales, download the PDF version . You can also print off this page of the website in order to complete this activity.

The Five Freedoms

A second system of looking at the well-being of the two mice considers in more detail some of the parameters that affect their lives.  The scoring system is the same as for the five freedoms.