A device for the rapid anaesthesia of wild rats

When simple experimental techniques (eg venesection) requiring anaesthesia and subsequent recovery are carried out, a lot of time is spent in waiting for the next animal to be anaesthetized. This is especially notice-able when large numbers of a species as intractable as the wild common rat (Rattus norvegicus) are involved. The main feature of the device described (Fig. 1) is that while one rat is being fully anaesthetized, the next animal will be receiving an initial exposure to the ether, thereby considerably reducing the total experimen-tation time. In the course of an experiment conducted by 2 people, it permitted 90 wild rats.to be success-fully anaesthetized, bled from the caudal vein or orbital sinus, and allowed to recover in a total time of 155 min. With a conventional anaesthetizing box taking only 1 rat at a time; the same set of procedures would take approximately twice as long