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Thank goodness I am not a rat breeder because I would have engaged in frequent cage cleaning thinking I was doing my pregnant rats a favour. However, the opposite is true:
Here and in a follow-up study (Burn et al., 2008, we found no clear benefits of frequent cagecleaning
to breeding rats, but it did increase the likelihood of cannibalism, and the cleaning
process itself might have triggered parturition. We would therefore recommend that cages are not
cleaned during the last few days of pregnancy (possibly avoiding premature induction of birth) or
the first 2 days following birth (avoiding acute early disturbances). Also, more research is
required about what aspects of cleaning trigger cannibalism, but until then, noise and the transfer
of odours between cages are likely stressors, and should be kept to a minimum when cleaning the
cages of breeding rats.
The whole experiment can be found:
https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlu... of cage-cleaning frequency on.pdf?sequence=1
Here and in a follow-up study (Burn et al., 2008, we found no clear benefits of frequent cagecleaning
to breeding rats, but it did increase the likelihood of cannibalism, and the cleaning
process itself might have triggered parturition. We would therefore recommend that cages are not
cleaned during the last few days of pregnancy (possibly avoiding premature induction of birth) or
the first 2 days following birth (avoiding acute early disturbances). Also, more research is
required about what aspects of cleaning trigger cannibalism, but until then, noise and the transfer
of odours between cages are likely stressors, and should be kept to a minimum when cleaning the
cages of breeding rats.
The whole experiment can be found:
https://atrium.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlu... of cage-cleaning frequency on.pdf?sequence=1