Gavin Cleveland College Biology 1 Lab Paper 11/7/2013

Effects of Sedatives on Animals

Since the early 90s to the early 2000s sedatives, have commonly been used to sedative animals in the wild for research purposes. Like all methods of performing research, each has their own negative and positive effects on the animals. The biggest negative effect that occurs with these is loss of oxidation in the tissues and organs in the animals. This is commonly caused because the use of sedatives, relax the whole body and stop normal respiratory rates of the species involved. One solution to continue sedating these animals for testing, but to continue their respiratory rates normally, they used a different type of sedative, which through direct injection of serotonergic drugs. The experiments in this article, took place in September-December in 2007. The scientist were trying to gain a better understanding on whether these new types of sedatives, would be more effective then the old sedatives they would use commonly before on these animals. Although the old effects werent to severe, they did change certain variables in the animals results and these new sedatives, are supposed to stop these effects. To conduct this experiment, a group of scientist, obtained 19 adult, impalas, both males and females. These impalas were captured in the wild and were put in bomas, for 3 months before the experiments started. They did this so the animals had time to adapt to their new environment, so there wouldnt be any unnecessary neurological effects from the animals. Each of these drugs were injected into the

Gavin Cleveland College Biology 1 Lab Paper 11/7/2013 impalas intramuscularly, they also on separate days, injected the impalas, directly through their jugular veins, while they withdrew the same volume of blood in the syringes, too measure the results. Over the course of the 3 months of experiments, each impala was immobilized 3 to 4 times with sedatives, with a time span of at least 72 hours between each immobilization. After the impalas were immobilized, they would go into the data recording stage, where the scientist would give each impala a score based on how much movement they were doing. Etorphine, was used to sedate the impalas, and once they were sedated, they would injection water into the impalas to increase their oxygen saturation. Doxapram, was used after the injection of etorphine, and had a far greater oxygen increase in the impala, which proved to be less damaging on any tissues. Metoclopramide an buspirone, were used in combination to sedative the impalas as well. Metoclopramide was injected first and after the imobolization was intiated, the impala was then injected with buspirone, which increased the oxygenation of the impalas significantly, by the increase of respiration within 3 minutes of injection. Out of all of the drugs used in these experiments, Buspirone proved to be the least harmful drug used in sedating these impalas. Buspirone, showed a significant increase in oxygenation of the impalas, within minutes after the injection. The use of buspirone, after metoclopramide was the most successful method of sedating an animal, while maintaining minimal oxygenation loss throughout the impalas.

Gavin Cleveland College Biology 1 Lab Paper 11/7/2013

Resources:
Article:http://www.jwildlifedis.org/content/46/2/514.full.pdf By:Leith C. R. Meyer,1,2 Robyn S. Hetem,1 Linda G. Fick,1 Duncan Mitchell,1 and Andrea Fuller1 1 Brain Function Research Group, School of Physiology, University of the Witwatersrand, 7 York Road, Parktown, 2193, South Africa 2 Corresponding author (email: Leith.Meyer@wits.ac.za)