ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Tests page > Running tests > After testing > Retiring an animal from an experiment

Retiring an animal from an experiment

Introduction

When running an experiment which includes multiple trials (and/or stages) you may find yourself in a situation where you've performed some tests on an animal but you don't want to perform any more. This might be the case if the animal has become ill.

Of course, you could choose to delete the animal from the experiment but this would cause the results for the performed tests to be excluded from the analysis and you might not want this to occur (particularly if you only have a few animals, or the experiment is being run over a long period of time).

The solution in these cases is to retire the animal. As the name implies, the animal takes no further part in the experiment but results of tests it has already had are retained and are included in the experiment's results (although you can exclude them if you want to).

You should note that retiring an animal removes it from ALL future trials and stages of the experiment - if what you want to do is to stop testing an animal in a particular stage but continue testing it in subsequent stages then you should end the stage for the animal, rather than retiring it.

Details

How to retire an animal

Click the Animal number on the Test schedule report.

The Animal details report will open. Towards the top of this report is a drop list titled Status.

Open the drop list and change the animal's status to Retired. It's also a good idea to record why you retired the animal in the notes area.

The animal will be retired from the experiment and won't take part in any future tests.

How to un-retire an animal

If you want to un-retire an animal (i.e. have it participate in tests again) then you should simply follow the steps above and change the animal's status to Normal.

Note that when an animal 'comes out of retirement' it's possible that it will be behind the other animals in the experiment, for example, they may be in a future stage while the newly un-retired animal still has trials in an earlier stage to complete. The effect of this will be to 'block' the tests of the other animals until the un-retired animal has caught up.

A retired animal can disappear completely from the Test schedule report

If an animal has had at least one test and you then retire it will still have its performed tests shown on the Test schedule report (at least it will have, if the Include completed tests box is checked), however, if the animal has never had any tests performed and you retire it then it'll disappear from the Test schedule report completely.

This may not seem too important, but it will cause a problem if you want to un-retire the animal because to do this you need to access the Animal's details report which you'd normally do by clicking the animal number on the Test schedule report. The solution to this problem is to switch to the Experiment page and there select the View animals button in the ribbon bar. This will open the Animals spreadsheet where you can edit the status of any animal in the experiment.

ANY-maze help topic T0823