Stress in the period during transport and around slaughter is known to influence the physiological and biochemical processes in pigs (Adeola and Ball, 1992). Pigs that become non-ambulatory without obvious injury, trauma or disease and refuse to walk, during loading, transport, unloading or while in the lairage are considered fatigued. Literature available on pig transport and slaughter suggest...

An eloquent example of experience-induced neuroplasticity involves the enduring effects of daily "handling" of rat pups on the expression of genes regulating hormonal and behavioral responses to stress. Handling-evoked augmentation of maternal care of pups induces long-lasting reduction of hypothalamic corticotropin releasing hormone (CRH) expression and upregulates hippocampal glucocorticoid r...

Fear is a very strong stressor, and the highly variable results of handling and transportation studies are likely to be due to different levels of psychological stress. Psychological stress is fear stress. Some examples are restraint, contact with people, or exposure to novelty. In many different animals, stimulation of the amygdala with an implanted electrode triggers a complex pattern of beha...

The heat shock response in yeast is regulated by the interaction between a chaperone protein and a heat shock transcription factor, and fine-tuned by phosphorylation.

Handling laboratory animals during test procedures is an important source of stress that may impair reliability of test responses. Picking up mice by the tail is aversive, stimulating stress and anxiety. Responses among anxious animals can be confounded further by neophobia towards novel test environments and avoidance of test stimuli in open areas. However, handling stress can be reduced subst...

Handling stress is a well-recognised source of variation in animal studies that can also compromise the welfare of research animals. To reduce background variation and maximise welfare, methods that minimise handling stress should be developed and used wherever possible. Recent evidence has shown that handling mice by a familiar tunnel that is present in their home cage can minimise anxiety com...

In this study we investigated the effect of environmental enrichment and handling on the acute physiological stress response caused by short periods of restraint in individually housed female mice. Heart rate (HR) and body temperature (BT) were measured by radiotelemetry and compared with plasma corticosterone (pCORT) levels. Also, postmortem thymus weight and tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) activity...