Growth and development of rats artificially reared on rats 'milk or rats' milk/milk-substitute combinations

Abstract

1. Rat pups were artificially reared (AR) from post-natal day 5 by intermittent gastric infusion. Mother-reared (MR) siblings served as controls. Fourteen measures of body and organ growth were taken at the end of each experiment.2. In Expt 1, two batches of pups were given rats' milk only, obtained by manual expression from anaesthetized dams.3. The first batch, reared to 12 d, grew less well than the MR group, probably because they received too little milk. However, relative to body-weight, organ weights were as great or greater than those of MR pups, except for heart weight. The second batch, given more milk and reared to 20 d, showed no deficits in organ or body-weights, but excesses in kidney, gastrocnemius muscle, stomach and caecum weights. There were no losses from ‘bloat’, a condition of gastrointestinal distention often encountered in artificial rearing with milk substitutes.4. Obtaining rats' milk is extremely labour-intensive and in Expt 2, more economical regimens were devised in which pups were started off on expressed rats' milk and then changed to a milk substitute resembling rats' milk in composition, either abruptly at 12 d or gradually between 8 and 17 d.5. Both regimens were successful, in that there were no losses from bloat and most measures of growth were at least as great as in the MR group. Only heart weight was lower in both AR groups and adrenal weight in the abruptly changed AR group. The weights of the stomach and caecum and the length of the small intestine were all high in both AR groups.6. It is concluded that giving rat pups expressed rats' milk for the first few days of artificial rearing largely avoids the problem of bloat and results in satisfactory growth.