we have IVC system in our department, but facing the difficulty in handling rats and maintenance, as it can accommodate only 2 rats per cage. please anwser this question so that if not necessary we can buy normal rat cages where 5 rats/cage can be kept. it inturn help to reduce the work load.
As far as I know, animals can experience 'isolation stress' or 'social stress' in differing housing conditions and social stress is probably the favourable option. Obviously if animals fight they should be separated for their safety.
Alex, it would depend on their immune status and your experiments. Are they likely to come to harm if housed in normal cages? Would their housing in normal cages cause harm to other animals in the facility?
As Ryan mentioned there will be differences in the animal behaviour based on housing. I wouldn't change the housing in the middle of an experiment. Depending on the nature of your experiment, you may have to repeat earlier experiments if you change the housing.
Of course, it is not necessary to have IVC for animal study. But it is always better to have the animals raised in best environment if it is affordable. In the facility, IVC cages can be racked up, save lots of space and still with uniformly clean, well-ventilated environment. As Nisha pointed out it depends on experiments you are going to do. One should not change the surroundings in the middle of some expt.s but if you maintain your animals in normal cages throughout the experiment things will be fine since your control animals are also staying in the same environment.
Depends of the requeriments of the area where animals are mantained/located and the 'immune' status you need. For the researcher's general purposes, please, be aware that, i.e. in mice, just a 4 weeks of isolation period is used to generate an 'aggresivity model' . Under such a conditions.. certainly, your 'basal line' of anything is not a basal line anymore..
Thank you for the replies
My issue is that in my dept in IVC cages, we can only accomodate 2 rats/cage. while doing the dosing and maintenance from house keeping point of view we feel its difficult.
but if we have rat cages we can go for 4-5 rats/cage. so handling and space utilization will be more i feel
how you think about it, we are not dealing with any aggressive animal models or harmful models any way
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