ISS Rodent Habitat (2014)
&gt; Each Rodent Habitat can support up to ten mice or six rats providing sufficient room for the animals.<p>Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, their health and wellbeing probably isn&#x27;t the biggest concern for the scientists involved -- but unless this is hooking into a <i>much</i> larger habitat than the pictures indicate, lol this is not even close to sufficient space for 6 rats to live in for several months. It&#x27;s not sufficient space for 1 rat. Again, I&#x27;m trying to figure out if there&#x27;s a larger environment and the article just isn&#x27;t indicating it? So maybe I&#x27;m wrong and there&#x27;s an actual environment here that just isn&#x27;t pictured? But if the pictures of the habitat are the actual habitat... keeping 6 rats in a space the size of one of these containers for a month is very literally torture for the animals involved, plain and simple.<p>In most cases a group of 2-3 rats should have at least a full-height human-sized cage with multiple levels (and they should still regularly be given time outside of that cage in a larger environment), and ideally for 4-5 rats they should have double that space.<p>----<p>And for this research where they&#x27;re basically just asking &quot;did space do anything to their organs&quot; I doubt the scientists care, but there is a reproducibility problem surrounding rat research that boils down to &quot;animals act differently when they&#x27;re cooped up in inhumane conditions for months at a time.&quot; The most famous of these examples off the top of my head being the &quot;rat utopia&quot; experiment where a scientist stuck around 40 rats into a habitat that was barely big enough for 2 rats, then gave them literally zero stimulation of any kind, and when they predictably freaked the heck out out he then tried to pass it off as some kind of novel insight into the nature of societal collapse, population limits, and an intrinsic psychological need for competition. In fact the more obvious conclusion would have been &quot;when actively tortured, animals act weird.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s kind of a wild experiment because if you&#x27;re not familiar at all with rats it sounds insightful -- to the point where researchers actually called the environment a &quot;rat utopia&quot;. But if you are at all familiar with rat behavior it has all of the scientific credibility of Jigsaw writing up a formal paper about what the barbed wire maze he built in his basement proves about the human condition and urban planning.<p>If the only thing you&#x27;re doing to rats is dissecting them, then unless the stress increases disease it won&#x27;t mess with results. For determining the impact of space on a rat&#x27;s body, I don&#x27;t know how much the rat&#x27;s quality of care changes anything about the outcome. The cage being shown isn&#x27;t big enough for them to exercise, but I don&#x27;t know if them being able to exercise is even relevant to the test.<p>But for any experiments that are more extensive, how the animals are cared for can significantly change the results you get: it can affect the likelihood of disease in the rodents, it can affect what problems they&#x27;re more prone to exhibiting and how quickly they recover from operations and how they react to treatments. And of course it affects behavior.