PETA Urges Funding Cuts for Aussie Animal Strangulation Tests at Monash University
PETA is renewing its calls for retractions of Monash University’s rat strangulation papers, including one published last month, and a cut in taxpayer funding after its authors failed to adequately defend their cruel experiments. A laboratory at the Melbourne university has strangled rats, bashed them over the head with weights, and forced them to swim until exhaustion, supposedly to mimic human domestic abuse.
In a joint letter sent to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), PETA US and PETA Australia demand that the organisation follow its policy to discourage funding applications for experiments that use the forced-swim test and also add strangulation and traumatic brain injury tests to that policy.
A second letter to scientific publisher Elsevier presents evidence that the experiments didn’t adhere to ethical guidelines or the journal’s policies and urges it to pull the university’s papers and prohibit publication of similar experiments in the future.
A third letter to Monash University points out the many scientific and ethical problems with these experiments and urges it to switch to cutting-edge, human-relevant research that doesn’t use animals.
Even a child could see that slamming weights onto animals’ heads to cause brain damage and choking the life out of them is cruelty, not science. PETA calls on the NHMRC to stop throwing money at these disgusting experiments, Elsevier to stop publishing them, and Monash University to stop tormenting animals and switch to state-of-the-art research that actually helps humans.
Rats are highly intelligent and social animals who show love to their families, form complex social structures, and bond easily with human guardians. At Monash University, experimenters dropped weights on pregnant rats’ heads, causing severe eye injuries and likely brain damage, denied them adequate pain relief, and strangled some before killing them all.
In another test, experimenters strangled dozens of adolescent female rats for 90 agonising seconds with a weighted band, applying a force about three times the rat’s body weight. Other rats were violently hit in the head with a weight to inflict traumatic brain injury. Some endured both abuses, others were resuscitated after being strangled, and all were killed at the end.
In a third test published last month, experimenters subjected female rats to traumatic brain injury without pain relief and strangled the animals for 90 seconds daily for five days before injecting them with a psychedelic drug and killing them.
It’s Violence, Not Science
Please join us by taking action today. Urge Monash University, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and Animal Welfare Victoria to prohibit the conduct, funding, and permitting of animal strangulation and brain injury experiments, respectively.
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