Blog 5: Animal Care
Back in my technician days, I was trained in solid animal care practices. But early in my PhD, I realized: proper animal care is a top-down game. When the staff and vets treat my mice with TLC, I do too. When they’re neglectful, it’s easy to slip into bad habits that hurt my experiments.
Experimental Outcomes Depend on Animal Care
During my time in Dr. Conor Liston’s lab, I tested the impact of “chronic unpredictable stress” on animal behavior. I’d disturb the animals multiple times a day—sometimes by tilting their cage or wetting their bedding, other times with restraint stress in a falcon tube. The goal? Mimic the unpredictable stresses humans face**. It taught me that housing and handling need to match the experiment’s goals.
Of course, unpredictable stress is good if I’m trying to model what it’s like to live in stressful living conditions. However, most studies use 'standard' housing conditions since they are modeling an aspect of behavior. But over the years, I’ve learned that 'standard' is subjective—and how you define it can impact experimental outcomes.
What are “standard” housing conditions?
Standard housing conditions are set by IACUC alongside the institution’s animal facility. Together, they determine the guidelines for cage size, feed, bedding, cage-change schedules, lighting cycles, and housing/breeding protocols to ensure animal well-being. As a pet owner, it pains me to see that ‘standard’ in research often mean dreary and dull conditions.
Life for a lab mouse is strange—and honestly, a bit like prison. They’re locked up, isolated, and put in 'solitary confinement' if they start fights. Their lives follow a strict schedule set by the experimenter (the warden), the vet (the chaplain), and the animal care staff (the guards).
So, the real question is: do you want to be a warden like Hal Moores in The Green Mile? Or like Samuel Norton in Shawshank Redemption?"
What my “standard” housing and handling conditions look like
Most of my animals go through a reward or fear-learning task. Even with fear learning, I don’t want them stressed all the time. I just want them to freeze when a tone means a shock is coming—but their baseline stress should stay steady. So I try and treat my mice well.
I keep 3-4 animals in a standard-sized cage with a food hopper, a nestlet or two, a water bottle with a lickspout, and something they can explore—recently, I’ve been using toilet paper tubes. These tubes act as little burrows and make picking them up easier. They also help the mice feel more comfortable in my hands.
I usually don’t begin properly handling my mice until several days before I begin behavior training. This is usually 3-4 weeks after I’ve injected my sensor and implanted my fiber. Once the animals are less skiddish when I pick them up, I start patch-cord habituation by momentarily immobilizing the mice so I can attach the patch cords to their heads. For the first couple of days, I just have them attached to the patch cord for 5-10 minutes. Then I begin behavior training which involves 20-30 minutes of patch cord time per animal.
One last note. I try and be as precise as possible about how much water my animals receive when I place them on water restriction for reward training. I individually hand-feed my mice their daily allotment of water. It’s more time-consuming than just throwing a bunch of water in a petri dish, but it ensures that all mice are receiving the same level of restriction, which should keep them equally engaged in getting water during training.
What I’d like my “standard” housing and handling conditions to look like.
In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be testing the effects of enriched housing on mice with larger hardware like mini2p headplates and optofluidic cannulas. Many researchers isolate mice post-op to protect the hardware, but I’d rather let them socialize. My plan is to house them in a rat cage for extra space and add enriching toys to help them get used to moving around with the implants.
Eventually, I’d love to move all my mice to this setup—it’s a huge step up from the small, boring box they’d otherwise sit in.
Conclusion
My goal is to get you thinking about how you house and handle your animals. They’re the heart of the experiment. If we optimize how we treat them, we might just get cleaner, more consistent results.
** I think that human life (cultural, not biological) has evolved so far beyond mouse life that it’s hard for me to believe that putting the animal’s cage on a tilt for a few hours is anything remotely like the financial stress I face throughout my PhD, or the severe impostor syndrome I had in my first couple of years at Davis. These models are great for studying circuit mechanisms behind the stress response, but I think some papers could tone down claims about how specific stress models mirror human stress types
Blog 5: Animal Care
Back in my technician days, I was trained in solid animal care practices. But early in my PhD, I realized: proper animal care is a top-down game. When the staff and vets treat my mice with TLC, I do too. When they’re neglectful, it’s easy to slip into bad habits that hurt my experiments.
Experimental Outcomes Depend on Animal Care
During my time in Dr. Conor Liston’s lab, I tested the impact of “chronic unpredictable stress” on animal behavior. I’d disturb the animals multiple times a day—sometimes by tilting their cage or wetting their bedding, other times with restraint stress in a falcon tube. The goal? Mimic the unpredictable stresses humans face**. It taught me that housing and handling need to match the experiment’s goals.
Of course, unpredictable stress is good if I’m trying to model what it’s like to live in stressful living conditions. However, most studies use 'standard' housing conditions since they are modeling an aspect of behavior. But over the years, I’ve learned that 'standard' is subjective—and how you define it can impact experimental outcomes.
What are “standard” housing conditions?
Standard housing conditions are set by IACUC alongside the institution’s animal facility. Together, they determine the guidelines for cage size, feed, bedding, cage-change schedules, lighting cycles, and housing/breeding protocols to ensure animal well-being. As a pet owner, it pains me to see that ‘standard’ in research often mean dreary and dull conditions.
Life for a lab mouse is strange—and honestly, a bit like prison. They’re locked up, isolated, and put in 'solitary confinement' if they start fights. Their lives follow a strict schedule set by the experimenter (the warden), the vet (the chaplain), and the animal care staff (the guards).
So, the real question is: do you want to be a warden like Hal Moores in The Green Mile? Or like Samuel Norton in Shawshank Redemption?"
What my “standard” housing and handling conditions look like
Most of my animals go through a reward or fear-learning task. Even with fear learning, I don’t want them stressed all the time. I just want them to freeze when a tone means a shock is coming—but their baseline stress should stay steady. So I try and treat my mice well.
I keep 3-4 animals in a standard-sized cage with a food hopper, a nestlet or two, a water bottle with a lickspout, and something they can explore—recently, I’ve been using toilet paper tubes. These tubes act as little burrows and make picking them up easier. They also help the mice feel more comfortable in my hands.
I usually don’t begin properly handling my mice until several days before I begin behavior training. This is usually 3-4 weeks after I’ve injected my sensor and implanted my fiber. Once the animals are less skiddish when I pick them up, I start patch-cord habituation by momentarily immobilizing the mice so I can attach the patch cords to their heads. For the first couple of days, I just have them attached to the patch cord for 5-10 minutes. Then I begin behavior training which involves 20-30 minutes of patch cord time per animal.
One last note. I try and be as precise as possible about how much water my animals receive when I place them on water restriction for reward training. I individually hand-feed my mice their daily allotment of water. It’s more time-consuming than just throwing a bunch of water in a petri dish, but it ensures that all mice are receiving the same level of restriction, which should keep them equally engaged in getting water during training.
What I’d like my “standard” housing and handling conditions to look like.
In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be testing the effects of enriched housing on mice with larger hardware like mini2p headplates and optofluidic cannulas. Many researchers isolate mice post-op to protect the hardware, but I’d rather let them socialize. My plan is to house them in a rat cage for extra space and add enriching toys to help them get used to moving around with the implants.
Eventually, I’d love to move all my mice to this setup—it’s a huge step up from the small, boring box they’d otherwise sit in.
Conclusion
My goal is to get you thinking about how you house and handle your animals. They’re the heart of the experiment. If we optimize how we treat them, we might just get cleaner, more consistent results.
** I think that human life (cultural, not biological) has evolved so far beyond mouse life that it’s hard for me to believe that putting the animal’s cage on a tilt for a few hours is anything remotely like the financial stress I face throughout my PhD, or the severe impostor syndrome I had in my first couple of years at Davis. These models are great for studying circuit mechanisms behind the stress response, but I think some papers could tone down claims about how specific stress models mirror human stress types
