Has anyone experience on working with Laboratory Rats? Need tips on their behavior?

how to tame or train them. I conduct behavioural tests and need for them to cooperate by holding still. or Tips on a good restraind scaffold or such things..?? it is important medical research on back pain for all you animal right activists. and they die of old age one day and do not suffer pain while conducting the experiment. THank you
Answers:
Yeah i have done once. Well in order to tame them i went through a experiment called as pavlos experiment. This is very easy way to tame animal. here before u give food to animal u ring a bell and then give food. When u do this for next 15-20 times the animal gets habituated. now next time when u ring bell alone animals runs towards you. This way they are tamed. IN case of rats also this is applicable. Just cage them in special cage where there are many twists and turns. this make them work more for their food. Though it takes time but it works aewsome. Abt makig them still then i said u that once they are tamed, just ring bell, they come running to you and stand there until u give them food. NIce way na..!

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Lab rats are grown to meet specific criteria depending upon the study they will be used in. They come in racks of 72, with each rat having it's own little cage. Although there are methods for tameing them, it's generally unnecessary to do so. As far as training, well that just comes along without any particular intervention. The research assistants where thick gloves and pick them up by placeing a gloved hand on top of thier backs, and holding them firmly. The caveat though is that about 1 in 90 of these rats are 1000 times smarter than the others, and stand on thier hind legs squeezing themselves into a back corner, making it hard to get a hold on them. Over the course of two years in graduate psych at Purdue, we had several such rats get away. One of them was never found! Presumably it got into someones book bag and jumped out when the student went outside. Thats smart!

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Rat handling has to be done with care, due to their largish size. Lab rats are huge, I think they are norwegian. ANyway, you put them on a metal grate on top of their cage, so they can grasp something. Then you grab the nape of their neck and as much fur as humanly possible around the nape. You need to bunch up all the loose fur or the rat will turn around and bite (hard). You then have to grab the posterior portion including the tail in your other hand (usually left hand). They your assistant can inject the rat or do whatever needs to be done. If you just need to pick them up, use the tail, it's strong. For surgury we first stick them in a CO2 container to knock them out, then use aerosol anasthetic over the nose to keep them under. Anyway you should have an animal care course to guide you through this.

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