Video: PETA Allies Confront University of Bristol VC at Q&A Event Over Near-Drowning Tests
Oct 2 2024
Video: PETA Allies Confront University of Bristol VC at Q&A Event Over Near-Drowning Tests
Bristol – Earlier today, a PETA supporter unveiled a sign reading, “Bristol Uni: Drop the Forced Swim Test,” before University of Bristol Vice-Chancellor and President Evelyn Welch during a Q&A event in Bristol to protest against the university’s refusal to ban the near-drowning test on animals.
Video footage of the disruption is available here.
This action is the latest in PETA’s campaign calling for an end to the use of the cruel forced swim test, in which experimenters induce panic in vulnerable small animals by putting them into inescapable cylinders of water. They swim for fear of drowning, attempt to climb the sides of the container, and dive underwater to look for an escape. Once the test is complete, experimenters often kill the animals.
The test is conducted under the erroneous assumption that subjecting animals to the fear of drowning can reveal something about mental health conditions in humans.
“Forcing small, terrified animals to swim out of fear of drowning is inhumane and unnecessary – it offers no benefit to the advancement of mental health studies in humans,” says PETA Senior Science Policy Manager Dr Julia . “PETA urges the University of Bristol to follow the lead of the majority of the UK’s top universities that have already shunned this cruel experiment.”
The University of Bristol is one of the last institutions in the UK to continue using the forced swim test. Leading institutions, including the universities of St Andrews, Exeter, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, and Southampton as well as King’s College London and Newcastle University, have indicated that they neither use the forced swim test nor intend to do so in the future.
The Home Office recently announced its intention to eliminate the experiment in the UK – which would be the first time a specific test on rodents has been banned in the country. Nearly all big pharmaceutical companies, including earlier this week, have shunned the test after hearing from PETA scientists.
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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