Refinement of laboratory fish procedures addresses anesthesia, handling stress, and endpoint criteria to minimize suffering in research using zebrafish and other teleost models.
Laboratory fish welfare refinement addresses both the procedures fish undergo and the housing conditions in which they spend the majority of their lives. Most animal welfare attention focuses on procedures, but housing welfare — appropriate social conditions, environmental complexity, and species-specific needs — constitutes the daily welfare experience of research fish. Zebrafish kept in isolation for experimental purposes experience social deprivation stress that is not just a welfare concern but a confounding variable that affects experimental results. Welfare refinement that improves housing quality thus serves both welfare and scientific validity simultaneously, making the case for welfare investment compelling on purely pragmatic grounds.