Abstract
The fear experienced by the animal in an experimental situation may distort the results of the experiment. Although handling is known to influence the animals’ reactions, this fact has been largely ignored in behavioural studies. We studied the effects of gentling on behaviour of rats in three fundamentally different open-field situations: stressful, indifferent and frightening.
90 male Kuo:Wistar rats, aged 95 days, were tested on openfield for 5 min. on 4 successive days. 3 weeks before testing the rats were randomly divided into two groups: one to be individually gentled and the other to be left with routine care only.
The behaviour in all the groups was typical to the test situation. A basic difference was found in the behaviour of the gentled and nongentled rats. While all the rats showed a slight and transient fear of the new situation, the nongentled ones also showed a different type of fear, suggesting fear towards the experimenter.
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© 1988 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordecht
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Hirsjärvi, P.A., Junnila, M.A. (1988). The Effects of Gentling on Open-field Behaviour of Rats. In: Beynen, A.C., Solleveld, H.A. (eds) New Developments in Biosciences: Their Implications for Laboratory Animal Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3281-4_64
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3281-4_64
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