| | Preliminary physical assessment. | | Auxological parameters (body size, weight, growth rate, dentition, and sexual development) | | Physiological parameters (heart rate, breathing frequency, rectal temperature, food and water daily intake, and menstrual cycle) | | Presence of pathological features (non-experimental infections, fur loss, ringtail, chromodacryorrhea, adynamic ileus, neoplasms, etc.) | | Neurological assessment. | | Sensory acuity and discrimination (vision, hearing, olfaction, taste, vibrissae activity and somatosensation, and pain sensitivity) | | Motor assessment (posture, orienting, prehension, gait, motor coordination, reflex integrity, | | Arousal and sleep patterns) | | Ethological assessment of spontaneous behavior: | | Home-cage behavior (locomotion, nesting, etc.) | | Exploratory activity (novelty responsiveness and foraging behavior) | | Social behavior (playing behavior, aggressive and defensive responses, mating, maternal behavior) | | Grooming behavior (syntactical and nonchain) | | Age-specific behaviors (suckling and huddling in pups, food reaching and social play in adolescent rodents, etc.) | | Presence of abnormal behaviors (stereotyped behaviors and maladaptive reactivity to stimuli, etc.) | | Standardized behavioral assays | | Multimodal assays (open field, object exploration, etc.) | | Domain-specific assays |
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