Medical Research Funding Bodies Reject Cruel Near-Drowning Tests on Animals After PETA Push
30 July 2024
Medical Research Funding Bodies Reject Cruel Near-Drowning Tests on Animals After PETA Push
London – Following outreach from PETA, three independent medical research funding bodies – BMA Foundation, Medical Research Scotland, and The Dunhill Medical Trust – committed to not funding any future experiments that use the cruel and scientifically debunked forced swim test, paving the way for animal-free science.
In the widely discredited test, experimenters force rats, mice, or other small animals into inescapable beakers of water and watch them desperately swim in search of an escape under the erroneous belief that this can reveal something about human mental health conditions. Once the test is complete, experimenters kill the animals. The Home Office recently announced that it was immediately ending the use of the scientifically flawed test as a model of human depression or for studies of anxiety and its treatment and that it intends to eliminate it in the UK entirely in the near future.
“Forcing terrified animals to swim for their lives is both cruel and bad science, and sensible funding bodies rightly don’t want to waste critical time and money on tests that do nothing to advance human medicine,” says PETA Senior Science Policy Manager Dr Julia Baines. “PETA applauds the many institutions that have dropped this appalling test and urges shameful holdouts like the University of Bristol to follow suit.”
Leading institutions – including the universities of Brighton, Exeter, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, and Southampton as well as King’s College London, Newcastle University, and many major pharmaceutical companies – have indicated they neither use the forced swim test nor intend to do so in the future, making those that continue to use the cruel test, including the University of Bristol, outliers.
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, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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