vacantvisionary:tchy:jessiderps:sheerdarwinism:Wheel-running is probably not a welfare concern!Hey g
vacantvisionary:tchy:jessiderps:sheerdarwinism:Wheel-running is probably not a welfare concern!Hey guys, check this out!There is a lot of concern about exercise wheels in the cages of captive small animals (like mice and rats), because people tend to view the behaviour of wheel running as unnatural. It’s thought to be a stereotypy (a repetitive movement or action with no discernible benefit).But this new study suggests that actually, wheel-running has absolutely no connection to captive behaviours at all! Why not?Well, researchers placed a wheel in the wild, and found that wild animals spent just as much time on it that captive animals did. Originally, researchers added food to the protective cage where the wheel was found to encourage animal visits. Then they removed the food, and although the number of visits decreased, the number of visits that included a bout of wheel running actually increased by 42 percent, which suggests that the reason for the visit was actually to run on the wheel.That’s right - in the absence of a food reward, wild animals do in fact run on these wheels!And that means that wheel-running cannot be considered a stereotypic behaviour, because it’s not dependent on a food reward, and it was comparable in bouts between wild and captive animals.It’s possible that it’s simply a play behaviour. That is awesome, and reassuring for small animal owners (and researchers who rely on behaviourally sound animals).You can read the whole Guardian article here.And you can read the paper itself here.My rat kids are lazy and ignore their wheel :( I’m sorry, I’m just stuck on the fact that after mice, the animals that “ran” the most on the wheel were slugs.#WHAT COULD A SLUG POSSIBLY BE GETTING OUT OF THISThey gotta go fast, Tchy. They gotta go fast. -- source link