Project Objectives
- Collect existing scoresheets from fish labs and other animal groups.
- Systematically review literature on fish welfare assessment.
- Conduct facility visits and interviews to identify scorable indicators of welfare.
- Develop and test a standardised welfare scoresheet across species.
- Disseminate tools nationally and internationally.
How This Advances 3Rs Implementation
- Establishes validated, standardised welfare assessments for fish.
- Enables early detection of distress.
- Supports regulatory compliance and smoother licence processes.
- Builds long‑term refinement capacity across institutions.
Background
A scoresheet is the form staff use to record how an animal is doing, scoring specific signs so that welfare is judged consistently rather than by impression. It is one of the basic tools of refinement.
For fish, the tools are not there yet. Their use in research is growing, but assessment varies between facilities and often rests on the experience of individual staff rather than on agreed criteria. Fish also need indicators suited to them. They live in groups, so what matters is often how a fish behaves in relation to the others, not how it looks on its own. That inconsistency creates difficulties for researchers, for regulators and for the ethics committees deciding whether a study should go ahead.
This project set out to build that foundation. It gathered the scoresheets already in use, reviewed both the published research and the grey literature, the government reports, working papers, theses and conference proceedings where much practical welfare knowledge sits without ever reaching a journal, and drew on what staff in facilities already know. From that it developed standardised scoring systems for several species, working across the fish laboratories at the University of Bern.
