MELBOURNE (Australia) It is generally not a good time for rodents in Australia. As the country experiences one of its worst mouse plagues, desperate farmers are poisoning and chasing mice from fields across the country.One lab in Canberra is the nation's capital and a small group of lab rats had a very different experience. For a month, researchers have been tickling them daily to see if this will help improve their emotional well being and make them better models for future research.A poster from the Center for Health and Medical Research Canberra explains that happy animals can lead to better research results and patient care.It states that rat tickling is an animal technician's technique to imitate the behavior of juvenile rats in play-fighting. We aim to reduce the impact of handling our rats and foster positive human-rat interaction.
