| Popis: |
Understanding the signs of laboratory animal distress, pain and anxiety and its mitigation is quintessential in obtaining meaningful results from animal studies. Even routine management practices like cage changing, tattooing, transportation, restraint and blood collection can cause stress in animals, and so professional judgement shall be made on the requirement of anaesthesia/analgesia on a case-to-case basis. Various techniques are available to assess the levels of pain in rodents and rabbits and there is a wide spectrum of drugs from which a choice can be made on analgesic/aesthetic administration. Any interaction shall be avoided between anaesthetic/analgesic drugs used and targeted data to maintain the dependability of results, and so the choice of the anaesthetic/analgesic regimen is of utmost importance. Monitoring anaesthesia to ensure a safe recovery and to provide analgesia thereafter requires knowledge and practice. Further, existing practices of euthanasia shall also be judiciously scrutinized by dynamically imbibing the evolving data and recommendations published by scientific groups. This chapter aims to throw light on the basic scientific principles and practices of laboratory animal anaesthesia, analgesia and euthanasia in rodents and rabbits and its welfare components from a practical perspective. |
