Applied Animal Nutrition-I

FEEDING TRIALS WITH LABORATORY ANIMALS

• Today many of the problems in nutrition are being studied with small animals, such as the rat. The Processes of growth, reproduction and lactation can be effectively investigated and the value of various feeds for the different functions can be determined.
• The feeding trials can be conducted with several laboratory animals like rat, mice, guinea pig,rabbit,hamster etc.,

Advantages

• Low cost in terms of animals, feed and labour and the shorter time involved for a given experiment in view of the shorter lifecycle of the lab animal.
• The influence of individual variability can be reduced to a minimum by the use of animals of similar genetic and nutritional history by using large number of animals and by close environmental control.
• It is very easy to slaughter lab animals for chemical and histological examinations compared to large animals.
• Laboratory animals are useful for studying various fundamental principles of nutrition.
• Serve as a pilot experiment, by means of which much preliminary information can be obtained more quickly and at much less cost than with large animals.

Disadvantages

• The results obtained in feeding trials with small animals cannot be considered to have direct application to the various species of farm animals because of the differences in physiology and other considerations.