Introduction
When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world last year, most mouse breeding facilities, along with everyone else, had to radically change their way of working. The rolling national lockdowns and social distancing necessitated fast thinking and pushed us to make decisions outside of our normal experience and comfort zones. Faced with the prospect of animal care shortages and concerned with whether we would have the resources to feed, clean, and provide medical care to thousands of animals, many facilities reduced their colonies in some form or another. Some Institutes and Universities stopped breeding wild type animals, relying instead on commercial breeders to supply them. Others asked their researchers to look at reducing colony size or removing tick-over colonies whilst new experiments were halted and mice could not be used within the time frame needed.
When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world last year, most mouse breeding facilities, along with everyone else, had to radically change their way of working. The rolling national lockdowns and social distancing necessitated fast thinking and pushed us to make decisions outside of our normal experience and comfort zones. Faced with the prospect of animal care shortages and concerned with whether we would have the resources to feed, clean, and provide medical care to thousands of animals, many facilities reduced their colonies in some form or another. Some Institutes and Universities stopped breeding wild type animals, relying instead on commercial breeders to supply them. Others asked their researchers to look at reducing colony size or removing tick-over colonies whilst new experiments were halted and mice could not be used within the time frame needed.