Theme 2 Laboratory animal welfare and refinement Workshop 2.1 Environmental enrichment and housing standards

Summary Enrichment is a refinement as it should promote animal wellbeing. Any refinement needs to be beneficial to animals and should not interfere with the study. While refinement aims can be connected to research data, reduction alternative suffers from lack of research. Instead of trying to assess the impact of enrichment on variance of every determination, it could be more productive to look at effects on variance of welfare indicators; low variance there is likely to reflect as low variance in other determinations. And at the same time aim at most uniform welfare of the animals in the study.