Anjelica Huston Pushes University of Bristol to End ‘Wicked’ Near-Drowning Experiment on Animals
22 Aug 2024
Anjelica Huston Pushes University of Bristol to End ‘Wicked’ Near-Drowning Experiment on Animals
Bristol – Award-winning actor and longtime PETA ally Anjelica Huston – who was recently in Bristol filming a new Agatha Christie mystery television series – sent a letter to University of Bristol Vice-Chancellor and President Evelyn Welch urging her to end the institution’s use of the cruel forced swim test. In the widely criticised test – which has been denounced by hundreds of scientists and academics – experimenters place small animals into inescapable beakers of water, where they swim frantically and attempt to climb the steep sides of the container and even dive underwater, desperate to find a means of escape. The experiment is conducted under the erroneous assumption that it can reveal something about mental health conditions in humans.
“Years ago, I played the Grand High Witch in The Witches, and this wicked experiment sounds like something she would have concocted!” writes Huston. “The misguided claim that the forced swim test may provide information about stress-related conditions in humans is nothing more than hocus pocus. What it’s really doing is frightening defenseless animals and getting in the way of the development of much-needed effective treatments for mental health conditions.”
The Home Office recently came one step closer to banning the forced swim test: Lord Sharpe of Epsom, former parliamentary under secretary of state for the Home Office, accepted the Animals in Science Committee’s advice to ban the use of this scientifically flawed test as a model of human depression or for studies of anxiety and its treatment. Following discussions with PETA entities around the world, 15 companies and over a dozen top UK universities, including King’s College London, ended their use of the forced swim test. More than 50,000 people – including actors Sir Mark Rylance, Dame Joanna Lumley, and Richard E Grant – have urged the University of Bristol to do the same.
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:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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