Stress in birds due to routine handling and a technique to avoid it

The stress that might result in animals from the routine handling that most experimental studies involve, e.g., weighing, injecting, and blood sampling, is usually assumed to be minimal when the animals look quiet. However, the intensity of this stress remains largely ignored. We have developed a system that allows blood samples to be taken from freely behaving geese without entering the animal room. In these entirely undisturbed geese, the humoral indexes of stress, i.e., blood levels of catecholamines, corticosterone, and lactate, were as low or even lower than the lowest values previously reported for birds. Remarkably, the mean basal values for epinephrine and norepinephrine were 90-fold and 5-fold, respectively, below the lowest values in the literature. Stress-induced variations in pH that would have concealed detection of nutrition-induced changes in pH were eliminated. In contrast, even though the birds looked quiet during a short 5-min routine handling procedure, to which they had been accustomed for weeks, there was a dramatic increase in the level of humoral indexes of stress. These increased severalfold within only 2 min, and the return to initial values could take up to 1 h. Acid-base balance was also disrupted. Thus, in studies on animals, the absence of stress cannot be deduced from only behavioral observations. Only a system for taking blood without human interference may enable stress-free investigations.