From ‘Love Island’ to ‘Science Lab’, Lucie Donlan Highlights Cruel Forced Swim Test

“Imagine being dropped into deep water with no way to escape. What would you do?” Lucie Donlan asks in a new PETA video. “As you look for help, you realise no one is coming.”

Struggling frantically to keep her head above water, Love Island star Lucie Donlan is urging viewers to put themselves in the position of mice and rats used in the forced swim test.

“Experimenters simply watch as the small animals struggle.”
– Lucie Donlan, Love Island star

The Test Is Forced Cruelty

In the widely discredited test, which is still being conducted by some UK universities, small animals, who may or may not have been dosed with a test substance, are put into inescapable beakers of water and made to swim to keep from drowning. The animals are later killed.

Experimenters continue to use the forced swim test in the erroneous belief that these cruel and absurd experiments can provide insight into mental health conditions in humans, despite all evidence to the contrary. These experiments do nothing more than waste animals’ lives and delay the development of new, effective treatments that are desperately needed.

Donlan Is No Stranger to Animal Rights Activism

Donlan demonstrates how desperate the animals become as they frantically search for an escape, becoming more terrified with each passing minute. “It angers me and makes me feel sick to think that this is still allowed,” concludes Donlan. “Please join me in helping to stop the forced swim test.”

This is Donlan’s second campaign standing up (or treading water) against animal cruelty. She previously appeared in a PETA ad urging people to avoid SeaWorld and other marine abusement parks . The surfer and model is a friend to animals in and out of the water!

Join Our Campaign – Take Action for Animals Now!

Following discussions with PETA entities, 15 companies and several universities, including King’s College London, have declared that they don’t intend to use the forced swim test.

Join us and Lucie in calling on universities and drug companies to ban the near-drowning of animals.