Our impact

Funding advances in animal welfare science

The research we fund generates evidence about the lives and needs of animals and supports practical improvements in their welfare. Some examples:

Studies carried out under our William Russell Research Fellowship, led by Professor Joe Garner and Dr Brianna Gaskill, showed that most laboratory mice are chronically cold-stressed under standard housing conditions. Providing simple nesting material, such as strips of paper, allows mice to thermoregulate naturally; they build their own nests for insulation and can leave when warm, retaining control over their own comfort. The act of nest-building also provides the mice with environmental enrichment. The project established evidence-based standards for nesting enrichment and demonstrated benefits to behaviour, physiology, breeding performance and welfare. The work has contributed to nesting enrichment becoming standard practice in research institutions worldwide, improving the welfare of tens of millions of mice annually.

In the 1950s, we employed William Russell and Rex Burch as Research Fellows. Their collaboration led directly to the development of the 3Rs framework (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement), which now underpins the use of animals in scientific research globally and is embedded in legislation across Europe and beyond. The framework makes research more humane and more effective, and reduces the number of animals required. It now sets the standards for the care and use of hundreds of millions of research animals worldwide each year.

Research we funded at the University of Bristol, led by Emma Harding, Elizabeth Paul and Michael Mendl, helped establish cognitive bias as a tool for assessing the emotional lives of animals. Their 2004 paper in Nature showed that animals in stressful conditions make more pessimistic judgements about ambiguous situations, providing a behavioural window into how animals feel. The approach has since been validated across dozens of species, from pigs to bumblebees.