Hi everyone, We're seeing pretty widespread barbering (whisker and fur removal) in several of our group-housed female cages — mostly C57BL/6 background, housed 4-5 per cage. One "barber" mouse seems to be doing most of the grooming/plucking in each affected cage based on which one still has full whiskers versus the others.

The thing that's worked best for us is beefing up environmental enrichment — specifically adding chew blocks and a small igloo/hut to each cage gives the non-barber mice something to redirect chewing/gnawing behavior toward, and gives subordinate mice a place to retreat to and avoid the barber mouse when they want to. We didn't need to separate the barber mouse out in most cages — just adding the chew blocks + igloo combo reduced new barbering incidents by more than half over about a month, based on our informal whisker-scoring checks.