VICTORY! University of Melbourne Bans Near-Drowning Tests on Animals After PETA Push
The University of Melbourne has confirmed that it has prohibited the widely discredited and cruel forced swim test. The good news comes after hearing from PETA entities worldwide, Animal-Free Science Advocacy, and more than 12,000 PETA Australia members and supporters.
In the forced swim test, experimenters dose mice, rats, or other small animals with a substance, place them in inescapable beakers of water, and force them to swim to keep from drowning. Supposedly, this sheds light on human depression. Numerous scientists have debunked the test as a poor model of depression and warned that using it could rule out new, effective drugs for human patients.
Forcing terrified animals to swim for their lives is both abysmally cruel and utterly irrelevant to human depression. Other academic institutions that have pledged not to use the forced swim test include the University of Western Australia, Griffith University, Macquarie University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of South Australia, as well as more than a dozen universities in the UK. Most top pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Bayer, and others, have also banned the test after hearing from PETA entity scientists.
Join PETA in calling on The Florey, Monash University, and the University of Queensland to also ban this archaic experiment.
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