Snuggle Your Bunnies! An Alternative to Manual Restraint for Rabbit Gavage, Intravenous Injection and Ear Vessel Blood Collection

National AALAS 2022 -- Restraining a rabbit for various dosing routes and blood collection can be difficult with a myriad of items needing to be considered; from the animal's fragility to their ability to kick and injure technicians, and technician safety to animal welfare. All of these items need to be carefully calculated when looking at a manual restraint method for rabbit dosing and blood collection methods. For years we have used a manual restraint method that was effective in restraining the animals for gavage dosing, but in recent years has been correlated to ergonomic injuries to technicians, which has caused strains on resources due to time off, restricted numbers of technicians to restrain and the financial cost due to workman's compensation and associated healthcare fees. We began to search for a new way to effectively restrain the animals safely, while also helping to reduce the injuries and stress added to the technicians due to such a physical restraint. The method that we settled on uses a mechanical restraint that will wrap the animals in a way that they cannot easily react in a physical manner, protects technicians from kicking and allows for the technicians to have a more relaxed grip on the animal's head for the various tasks directed by protocol. While initially looking to reduce injury and stress to technicians, we also found that this mechanical restraint device also served to replace other restraint devices utilized for intravenous injection and ear vessel blood collection. This not only helped to reduce the strains incurred from the manual restraint, but also helped to keep the animals calm by making them feel secure and restrained, further reducing their stress while being dosed or having blood collected.