For immediate release:
22 August 2024

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

Where is Bristol, United Kingdom –

Award-winning actor and honorary director of PETA Anjelica Huston— who was recently in Bristol to film a new Agatha Christie TV crime series — has sent a letter to the University of Bristol’s Vice-Chancellor and President Evelyn Welch calling on her to end the university’s use of the cruel forced swimming test.

In these widely discredited experiments, experimenters panic defenseless small animals – including rats and mice – by placing them in cylinders of water from which they cannot escape and in which they swim for fear of drowning. They try to climb the cylinder’s steep walls and even dive underwater to find a way out. After the test is complete, experimenters often kill the animals. The experiment is often conducted under the false assumption that it can tell something about mental illness in humans.

“Years ago I played the Grandmaster Witch in The Witchesand this evil experiment sounds like she made it up!” writes Huston. “The misguided claim that the forced swim test can provide information about stress-related illnesses in humans is nothing more than hocus-pocus. In reality, it scares defenseless animals and hinders the development of much-needed, effective treatments for mental illness.”

Many major pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb and Bayer, as well as several research universities, including King’s College London and the University of Adelaide, have banned the forced swim test. PETA is now calling on pharmaceutical giant Sanofi to do the same.

PETA—whose motto includes, “Animals are not meant to be experimented on”—points out that every animal is someone and offers free empathy kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, on facebook.or Instagram.