Jirkof Paulin, Rudeck Juliane, Lewejohann Lars
Department Animal Welfare and 3R, University of Zurich, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland.
German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), German Center for the Protection of Laboratory Animals (Bf3R), 12277 Berlin, Germany.
Animals (Basel). 2019 Nov 25;9(12):1026. doi: 10.3390/ani9121026.
An animal's capacity to suffer is a prerequisite for any animal welfare concern, and the minimization of suffering is a key aim of refinement research. In contrast to the traditional focus on avoiding or reducing negative welfare states, modern animal welfare concepts highlight the importance of promoting positive welfare states in laboratory animals. Reliable assessments of affective states, as well as the knowledge of how to elicit positive affective states, are central to this concept. Important achievements have been made to assess pain and other negative affective states in animals in the last decades, but it is only recently that the neurobiology of positive emotions in humans and animals has been gaining more interest. Thereby, the need for promotion of positive affective states for laboratory animals is gaining more acceptance, and methods allowing the assessment of affective states in animals have been increasingly introduced. In this overview article, we present common and emerging methods to assess affective states in laboratory rodents. We focus on the implementation of these methods into applied refinement research to identify achieved progress as well as the future potential of these tools to improve animal welfare in animal-based research.
动物承受痛苦的能力是任何动物福利关注的前提条件，而将痛苦最小化是优化研究的关键目标。与传统上侧重于避免或减少负面福利状态不同，现代动物福利概念强调在实验动物中促进积极福利状态的重要性。对情感状态的可靠评估以及如何引发积极情感状态的知识，是这一概念的核心。在过去几十年里，在评估动物的疼痛和其他负面情感状态方面取得了重要进展，但直到最近，人类和动物积极情绪的神经生物学才越来越受到关注。因此，促进实验动物积极情感状态的需求越来越被接受，并且越来越多地引入了能够评估动物情感状态的方法。在这篇综述文章中，我们介绍了评估实验啮齿动物情感状态的常见方法和新兴方法。我们专注于将这些方法应用于实际的优化研究，以确定取得的进展以及这些工具在基于动物的研究中改善动物福利的未来潜力。
