Not so nuanced: Reply to the comments of Gaskill and Garner on 'Not so hot: Optimal housing temperatures for mice to mimic the environment of humans'

Under a Creative Commons license Dear Editors, We welcome the comments of Gaskill and Garner [1] on our previous paper, which concerned the optimal temperatures at which mice should be housed to best mimic the ambient environment routinely experienced by humans [2]. We are glad that they agree, from their behavioural perspective, with our detailed physiological analysis, that keeping mice at 30 °C to achieve this aim, as has recently been advocated, is ‘unwise’. We do, however, take issue with several of their arguments, in particular the suggestion that we stated ‘mice are most comfortable at 20–22 °C’, that our arguments are ‘empirically incorrect, obfuscating and highly detrimental to the welfare of mice’, and that we made an ‘overly simplistic presentation of the underlying biology’.