This page contains the material submitted to the local paper - The Davis Enterprise - for Explorit Science Center's news column published in that paper on Fridays.

Article for: The Davis Enterprise
Date: January 17, 2003
Author: Leslie Madsen
Contact: Tom Wickersham


CAPTIVE ANIMALS: HOW DO WE IDENTIFY MENTAL ILLNESSES?

The family dog's strangest behavior may be that it drinks out of the toilet bowl. The cat insists on leaping after birds in the yard, even though doing so means slamming its face into the window glass. The family parrot's behavior, however, is truly odd: it plucks its own feathers and rocks endlessly on its cage's perch.

The dog and cat are merely practicing extensions of natural behavior, but a wild parrot that exhibits such repetitive behavior would be considered ill. Scientists have known for years that animals in captivity behave differently from wild animals, but only recently have they begun to study the extent of captive animals' mental illness.

UC Davis postgraduate researcher Joseph Garner will share some of his research on this topic Tuesday in a lecture titled "Pacing Bears and Twirling Mice: Mental Disorder in Captive Animals." The talk, part of Explorit Science Center's Cutting Edge of Science Lecture Series, takes place at the Davis Branch Library.

Garner said the results of recent studies on captive animals mirror the findings of earlier studies on humans.

"Older studies show you're much more likely to exhibit certain behaviors if you're housed in an institution rather than moving about in the larger community," Garner explained.

By making modifications in mentally ill patients' environments, doctors have been able to change human behavior. The same kinds of modifications can help to prevent mental illness in animals, Garner said.

"In animals which are housed generally in enriched environments with lots of flexibility, lots of novelty, and lots of social interaction," Garner said. "You don't see many problems. But there is a far higher incidence of behavioral problems in parrots than in dogs or cats because the birds are housed in a barren environment."

Parrots, farmed mink, and laboratory mice are particularly susceptible to mental illness, he said, but the extent of the problem is not entirely clear. Garner cited one population-wide study in mice that found 98% of the mice performed some levels of abnormal behavior. That strain of mice, however, may have been particularly afflicted.

"There is so little that is known," Garner lamented. "On the one hand, there is potentially a huge problem that is being missed, and on the other hand, people think, 'Well, we don't know enough about these things, so we'll keep on doing what we're doing.'"

Garner emphasized that he is not against conducting experiments on animals, but he does want to improve animal welfare because doing so may make experiments more reliable, as well as increase the productivity of farmed animals. Accordingly, Garner and other scientists have made concerted efforts to talk with laboratory scientists, farmers, zookeepers, and other animal keepers.

"If you're going to do experiments with animals, then we're ethically bound to do those experiments in the best way possible. And the best way possible involves three things: that you use as few animals as possible, with the minimum amount of suffering involved; that you design your experiments in such a way that they are externally applicable as possible-that each animal you use gives you the maximum results it can; and that you minimize the suffering to all.

"I'm not telling people not to do experiments," Garner said, "but to do experiments more effectively. The very issue I'm trying to raise to other scientists is that there is a possibility that particular kinds of environments may make animals poor animals to do research with, and that many of the problems that are arising in research may be due to poor housing conditions."

In broaching the issue of animal welfare with farmers, Garner must be especially careful because people who farm captive animals are used to confrontations with animal rights activists. Garner emphasizes that he is not seeking to liberate animals from captivity or sabotage farming operations. Rather, Garner shows them that providing better environments for the animals can increase their profits.