Mice on the move: The changing spaces of laboratory mouse welfare

Gail Davies Department of GeographyUniversity College London

Enclosures and Stereotypies

Images: NC3R, Wellcome picture library

The biogeography of the laboratory mouse

• Part of a larger project – called Biogeography and Transgenic Life - http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/transgenic-life

• From the history to the historical geography of model organisms

• The changing geography of mutant mice– From technical to experimental objects: in the shift from mapping

genes to understanding gene function– From individual laboratories to large scale mutagenesis centres– The meanings of mice are also on the move – both bodily and

affectively

• Exploring this today through: – Disciplinary spaces, spaces of standardization and multiplicity

Sometimes it sounds like we’re battering the veterinary profession, we’re not because a friend of mine who’s a vet, when I made this comment about not being able to recognise [normal behaviour], she said “when did I last see a normal animal?”, which is actually a very, I’d never really thought of. Vets very rarely in practice ever see a normal animal, you don't take a healthy animal to the vet, you take your sick animal so they always have a slightly, well she said, “we have a very slightly biased view of what we think normal is.” (Interview welfare researcher 4, 2008)

Changing disciplinary spaces

Spaces of standardization

• “The barren environment that has been designed to minimize uncontrolled environmental effects on the animals might ironically be a primary source of pathologic effects” (Olsson et al, 2003, p.246)

• “Stereotypy and barbering do not just raise welfare issues. Stereotypy has been linked to dysfunction of the brain regions controlling the initiation and inhibition of behaviour and barbering may be linked with obsessive compulsive behaviour” (Latham and Mason, 2004, p.276)

• “They’ve also evolved to probably, I believe, enjoy the sunshine, like feeling the wind, like treading on grass, like eating different types of grasses, like seeing rain, experiencing differences between seasons, like digging, there’s a whole range of things, like the odd fight, like to play and we stick ‘em into this sterile environment with nothing to do. […] So all this standardisation is a false god to me in some way or another, that’s why I give animals treats, that’s why I try and make their environment a lot better”. (Welfare researcher 7, interview 2008)

FIMRe: Federation of International Mouse Resources (2006) Mammalian Genomics, 24, 9.

“China, too, is gearing up to make 100,000 mutants, with the goal of making 20,000 lines of mice, each with a different gene knocked out. […] The knock-out effort is arguably the largest international biological research endeavor since the Human Genome Project” (David Grimm, Science, June 2006)

Spaces of multiplicity

• Behavioural diversity: “the genetic diversity between a C57 Black 6 strain and a C38G and a CBA ... are so huge in terms of their drives to do different behaviours” (welfare researcher 4, Interview 2008)

• Genetic changes: “Then there are questions raised about whether the systems themselves are changed in some way, for example the coping systems can be changed […] you could have a genetic change which meant that the receptor was changed, the neural pathway was changed, the possibilities for response were changed in the sense of physiological reaction mechanisms […] You are asking some different things because it’s a modified animal and that’s also the major reason why I advanced the general view that no animal should be used in any commercial way at all unless it has been properly checked” (welfare researcher 1, interview 2008).

• Enrichment and welfare: “It just opens up a whole heap of questions again, does a whirling mouse for example want a tube? I’d have to do the experiment, it would probably make its life more miserable because it keeps bumping into the tube or something like that, but that doesn't mean there isn't some way you can make its life better.” (welfare researcher 2, interview 2008)

Some tensions and implications

• What is being standardized and what is experimental?

• The challenge for welfare research:– What is ‘normal behaviour’ for the laboratory mouse– The impossibility of empirical research on all strains

• The challenge for biomedical research:– Both researching and denying affective states – Balancing stability and emergence in science

• Some responses– The changing role of the animal caretaker– Circulating and centralizing welfare information– Developing cultures of care: “That’s what we want in every animal

house, it’s a culture of care, but no-one’s really quite sure what it means” (Welfare researcher 4, interview 2008)

Acknowledgements

• This presentation arises from a research fellowship funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council on ‘Biogeography and Transgenic Life’ (grant number RES-063-27-0093). I am grateful to the ESRC for this support.