Video: Lucie Donlan ‘Treads Water’ to Highlight Cruelty of Near-Drowning Animal Test
Video: Lucie Donlan ‘Treads Water’ to Highlight Cruelty of Near-Drowning Animal Test
Cornwall – Struggling frantically to keep her head above water, Love Island star Lucie Donlan appears in a new PETA UK video urging viewers to put themselves in the position of an animal used in the forced swim test. 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.
“Imagine being dropped into deep water with no way to escape. What would you do?” Donlan asks in the video. “As you look for help, you realise no one is coming.” She demonstrates how desperate the animals become as they fight for their lives, becoming more exhausted and terrified with each passing minute. “Experimenters simply watch as the small animals struggle.”
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.
“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.”
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. PETA UK is calling on the University of Bristol and University of Bath to follow suit.
This is Donlan’s second campaign for PETA. She previously appeared in an ad urging people to avoid SeaWorld and other marine abusement parks.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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