I was asked to comment on what the problem is with the stock photo above. RSPCA did well in pointing out that there is a problem, even though they somehow missed the opportunity to explain what the problem is!
The photo shows a mouse female and her litter. Based on that the pups have some fur but don’t yet have their eyes open, I would guesstimate that they are perhaps a week old. Mice are an altricious species, which means that the young are born in an undeveloped stage and are fully dependent on parental care for basically everything during their first week of life. They do develop very fast, and are ready to leave the nest at about a month of age, and sexually mature just a few weeks later. But at the stage of development in this photo, they aren’t capable of doing very much. The place for such young pups to be is the nest that their mother (or parents, males share the parental care if they can, although under laboratory conditions they may or may not be present) have prepared. That provides them with the thermal microenvironment they need – which needs to be warmer than that of an adult mouse given their poorly developed fur.
Judging from own experience of how long it takes to get a good photo of animals, by the time this photo was taken, the pups were no doubt cold. But that is only part of the problem. Anyone who has seen a professional photo session, or having had their photo taken in a studio, knows that this involves lots of bright light and reflectors. Well, this is precisely the kind of environment neuroscientists use to test anxiety in mice – an open and brightly lit space. Mice are nocturnal animals who spend their lives in tunnels and rarely venture out in the open light, and being forced to be in an environment which in nature would be dangerous is stressful for any mouse. Most likely, it is even more stressful for a female when her rather helpless pups are also exposed in this way.
If you want to learn more about our research in this field. check out the Alive Pup Project. But before you go there, let me just reflect on the different ways of making photos and for which purpose. You will see that in the Alive Pup Project we also show photos of pups taken out of their nest. But these photos were taken when the pups were weighed and inspected as part of a research project aiming to elucidate factors behind pup mortality. This is a big problem in laboratory mouse breeding, and research into the problem requires collecting data. In contrast, it is possible to make nice photos of mice in environments which are less stressful for them the one illustrated above
Still, I need to admit that we have also used stock photos of mice in unnatural environments. We simply did not think. Now we will!
Animalogues 