Talk:Laboratory Syrian hamster

1968 The Golden Hamster

This 1968 book is 545 pages long.

• Hoffman, Roger A.; Robinson, Paul F.; Magalhaes, Hulda, eds. (1968). The Golden Hamster - its biology and use in medical research (1 ed.). Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press. pp. 15–23. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Pages 323-458 are a comprehensive bibliography on the Syrian hamster, which means that those pages are only citation listings of every paper published in English about this animal. I am describing the book here because this is a key text for describing the state of animal testing of Syrian hamsters from their introduction to research in about 1940 to 1968. When drafting this article I used a 2012 text which must be more up to date, but still, I wanted to note that this 1968 book must be the first attempt to catalog all the research after the point when a cataloging project became something that could only be done with significant research funding and a lot of planning. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:14, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Medical research section is info from 2012

In this 2012 source

• Valentine, Helen; Daugherity, Erin K.; Singh, Bhupinder; Maurer, Kirk J. (2012). "The Experimental Use of Syrian Hamsters". In Suckow, Mark A.; Stevens, Karla A.; Wilson, Ronald P. (eds.). The laboratory rabbit, guinea pig, hamster, and other rodents (1st ed. ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press. pp. 875–898. ISBN 0123809207. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)

there is a presentation of contemporary Syrian hamster research. I thought it was a fascinating summary and adapted the information from it in this article. I would not expect this to stay up to date in Wikipedia because this touches primary research in dozens of fields of niche study. Still, I think this is useful for giving practical examples at a point in time of just how an animal might be used in research. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:23, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Huh?

"According to the Canadian Council for Animal Care, a total of 1,9312 hamsters were used for research in 2013 in Canada, making them the sixth-most popular rodent after mice (1,233,196), rats (228,143), guinea pigs (20,687), squirrels (4,446) and voles (2,457)." Johnbod (talk) 17:04, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

That one looks good to me, but how about "the sort of metabolic disorders which affect humans"? It surprises me if things that can go wrong with a rodent's metabolic chemistry completely match a primate's, which suggests to me that "the sort of" might more accurately be replaced by "many". Jim.henderson (talk) 13:19, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Resolved

Thanks. Jim.henderson I changed that line to "Syrian hamsters are susceptible to many metabolic disorders which affect humans". Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:54, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

About the "1,931" claim - I do not see that number in the cited source. The cited source cites another source, this government page, and on that page there is a link to a spreadsheet which says 1807+38+86 hamsters were used. Adding those numbers gives 1,931. I do not see the "sixth-most popular rodent" claim made. This might be original research.

I copied this sentence from some other article - perhaps the hamster article. WolfmanSF corrected the number somehow. Wolfman, did you see this number in some place other than as a sum of what is in the spreadsheet? I wonder if this fact might be WP:OR. I think it is interesting information but that might be too much editorializing. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:03, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

No, I only saw it as the sum of the spreadsheet values. Since the comma was initially out of place, it seemed an obvious typo. WolfmanSF (talk) 15:03, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

History of laboratory conditions of hamsters and other rodents

This paper is cited and praised by other researchers -

• Weisbroth S H. Post-indigenous disease: changing concepts of disease in laboratory rodents. Lab Anim. 1996;25:25–33

I am unable to find a record of it online. Supposedly it presents a 100 year+ social history of how scientists have developed health care practices for managing rodents. I thought that this article might benefit from sharing information from a history of the research on the practice of animal testing itself. As I have not found this source, I also have not read it. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:03, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

Best name?

Antony-22 you moved this article from Animal testing on Syrian hamsters to Laboratory hamster for "consistency with Laboratory mouse, Laboratory rat, etc.".

I named this article for consistency with Category:Animal testing by animal type. The mouse and rat articles are about the actual animals. The "animal testing" articles are about the research. I think these are separate classes of articles. Could you look again and comment? Blue Rasberry (talk) 03:55, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

I don't feel too strongly about the article naming. I noticed that the "Animal testing on X" articles tend to cover groups of species (frogs, invertebrates, rodents, non-human primates) whereas the "Laboratory X" articles tended to cover single species (mouse, rat). In theory, coverage of the strains of animals themselves is different than coverage of the types of tesing done on them, but they're closely related and in practice all the articles cover both topics to varying extents. I'd probably prefer that a consistent naming scheme be used for all these articles. But if you feel strongly about the name of this article, feel free to change it again. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 23:44, 3 March 2017 (UTC)