3 Minute 3Rs podcast: September 2022 transcript

[NC3Rs]

It’s the third Thursday of September, and you’re listening to 3 Minute 3Rs, your monthly recap of efforts to replace, reduce and refine the use of animals in research. This month we’re focusing on refinements for working with three different non-rodent species, starting with rabbits and assessing post-operative pain.

[NA3RsC]

Accurately assessing pain in animals is critical to help us refine their care by providing appropriate pain management. Previously two scales for assessing pain in rabbits have been developed and partially validated. However, no tools have been validated to determine a cut-off point for rescue analgesic.

Now, researchers have developed and validated a scale of acute postoperative pain in rabbits. To evaluate this scale, randomized, blinded footage from three other studies was taken for analysis showing good use of the principle of Reduction. Ultimately, their scale was concluded to have good content, criterion, and construct validities as well as responsiveness and reliability for assessing pain resulting from orthopedic and soft tissue surgeries. Its cut-off point for rescue analgesic should help refine painful procedures in rabbits.

Read the full article in PLoS ONE to learn more about the scale and access extensive video examples of rabbit behavior for scoring.

[NC3Rs]

Next, we’re all very familiar nowadays with using videoconferencing for work, but could it also be used to refine the process of pairing nonhuman primates into shared enclosures?

Social housing is of great benefit to these animals, but the initial socialisation of potential new cage mates can be very stressful. Professor Kristine Coleman's group at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre in the US have investigated whether a brief Zoom call between the animals before their first physical meeting may help refine this.

42 pairs of rhesus macaques took part in a 10-minute Zoom call prior to being introduced physically. During the call, surprisingly few pro-social behaviours were seen, although signs of anxiety and aggression were also very rare. Indeed, the primates did not pay as much attention to one another as expected given that other studies have found that nonhuman primates will pay attention to and even mimic the behaviours of monkeys in recorded videos.

Despite this, this study did find that Zoom calls in which one primate spent more time attending to the call than the other predicted a later successful pairing. This may be a sign of a clear hierarchy already being apparent, something that has previously been shown to be a strong predictor of successful cohousing.

You can read the full article in the journal Animals.

And finally, a two-pronged approach to assessing pain in sheep.

[LabAnimal]

In recent years, sheep have become a popular experimental model for orthopaedic research due to the similarities with humans in weight, bone and joint structure and bone regeneration. Orthopaedic surgeries typically elicit pain in the animals, which should be mitigated as much as possible. Accurate severity assessment is therefore critical. Clinical scoring for severity assessment, based on physiological and behavioural variables such as general appearance, is still the gold standard in orthopaedic studies, despite growing concerns that these clinical signs might not sufficiently reflect mild to moderate states of pain.

In a new study published in European Surgical Research, Eva Zentrich and colleagues used telemetry and the Sheep Grimace Scale in addition to clinical scoring to assess postoperative pain in sheep after surgery in a pilot orthopaedic study. Their findings show that, while clinical scoring did not reveal pronounced signs of pain in the animals, telemetry-derived data such as heart rate and activity, and the Grimace scale scores indicated slightly elevated levels after each surgery. These results support the use of the two methods for an improved severity assessment of surgical procedures in laboratory sheep.

[NC3Rs]

That’s it for this month’s episode. 3 Minute 3Rs is brought to you each month by Lab Animal, the North American 3Rs Collaborative, and the NC3Rs. If you have another minute, why not leave a rating or review for the podcast wherever you listen? As well as letting us know what you think, it will help the podcast reach more people interested in putting the 3Rs into practice. Thanks for tuning in, we’ll see you again next month for another 3Rs update.