Environmental Enrichment is a key component to every animal husbandry program, and should be considered as essential to the animal's health and well-being as good nutrition and medical care. A good enrichment program must have well-designed components and a framework for designing, implementing and evaluating the program.
The goals of an effective Environmental Enrichment program are simple and important for all the lab animals in your facility.
Goals of an effective Environmental Enrichment program.
- Increase behavioral diversity
- Reduce abnormal behavior
- Increase normal behavior patterns
- Increase positive utilization of environment
- Increase ability to cope with challenges in a more normal way
It is important to remember when adding dietary enrichment, that they do contain added nutrients or non-nutritional factors that may influence the outcome of your data. Dietary enrichment should only be used as a supplement and not replacement of their standard diet.