How Can You Tell If a Rat Is Depressed ?

What the Rat Brain Tells Us About Yours - Issue 47: Consciousness
▻http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/what-the-rat-brain-tells-us-about-yours

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A little more than a decade ago, Mike Mendl developed a new test for gauging a laboratory rat’s level of happiness. Mendl, an animal welfare researcher in the veterinary school at the University of Bristol in England, was looking for an objective way to tell whether animals in captivity were suffering. Specifically, he wanted to be able to measure whether, and how much, disruptions in lab rats’ routines—being placed in an unfamiliar cage, say, or experiencing a change in the light/dark cycle of the room in which they were housed—were bumming them out.[NB|▻https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=RR4M62C9V2898|http://static.nautil.us/12129_37160db944a57234ac9bf1ea9e99ae58.png|http://static.nautil.us/12130_8a2bd3e7515b99c88006a6956bc284e9.png]He and his colleagues (...)