To begin adaptation training. First, place the rats in opaque cages. Keep them as far away as possible from non-model rats, ensuring the other rats are outside the maximum visual range.
Turn on the power and set the treadmill to 10 meters per minute with a zero degree incline. Place the rats on the treadmill and ensure the movements are as gentle as possible to avoid stress. After a 15-minute training, clean up the feces and urine left by the rats.
Spray the treadmill with alcohol to eliminate the animal odor. Continue training all animals for a week. Prepare two test tubes, a hook and a loop fastener approximately 80 centimeters long.
Place steel balls into the test tubes, ensuring that the initial combined weight of the test tubes, the hook and the loop fastener is 150 grams. Prepare test tubes with different total weights in 10-gram increments with the maximum weight being 350 grams. Now with gloved hands, hold a rat.
Wrap the hook and loop fastener of a tube on the back of the rat about one centimeter from the midline. Change the tube from lower to higher weight until the rat is unable to stand when prodded or the experimenter leaves. Reduce the weight by 10 grams to allow the rat to stand.
This weight represents the rat's maximum weight-bearing capacity. To prepare the weight load, first, use a one to 1.5 meter long elastic therapeutic tape to secure the fixation objects. With clay, adjust the weight of the test tubes to reduce the swinging of the load.
After weighing the tubes and the fixation objects, add an appropriate amount of clay into the test tubes to adjust them to the target weight. Now use a glass stirring rod to evenly spread the clay inside the test tubes. Clay concentrated at one end of the test tube, may cause it to detach easily during training.
Adjust the total weight of the adjusted test tubes and clay at 50%of the rat's maximum weight-bearing capacity.
