University of Bristol Drops the Forced Swim Test on Animals After PETA Campaign
University of Bristol Drops the Forced Swim Test on Animals After PETA Campaign
Bristol – Today, the University of Bristol has confirmed that it has stopped subjecting animals to the cruel and useless forced swim test, in which animals are forced to experience the terror of near-drowning under the erroneous assumption that it can reveal something about mental health conditions in humans.
“The forced swim test is a bogus experiment that no institution should want to be associated with,” says PETA’s Vice President of Programmes, Elisa Allen. “Terrorising tiny animals in a scientifically and ethically controversial experiment does nothing to advance the treatment of mental health conditions in humans, and we applaud the University of Bristol for backing good science and dropping this horrifically cruel test.”
The announcement follows a nearly 5-year campaign by PETA, which saw, among other actions, dozens of hard-to-miss protests on campus and across the city and more than 100,000 protest letters from members and supporters, including Dame Joanna Lumley, Sir Mark Rylance, Richard E Grant, Anjelica Huston.
The University of Bristol was one of the last institutions in the UK still conducting the forced swim test, an experiment that induces panic in small, vulnerable animals by forcing them into inescapable cylinders of water, where they fear they may drown. The animals attempt to climb the steep sides of the container and even dive underwater, desperate to find a means of escape.
Because the test has long been criticized by the scientific community, the Home Office recently announced its intention to eliminate all uses of the experiment – which would be the first time a specific test on rodents has been banned in the country.
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]
#