Anjelica Huston Pushes University to End ‘Wicked’ Near-Drowning Experiment on Animals
For Immediate Release:
August 22, 2024
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
Award-winning actor and PETA Honorary Director Anjelica Huston—who was recently in Bristol to film a new Agatha Christie mystery TV series—has sent a letter to University of Bristol Vice-Chancellor and President Evelyn Welch urging her to end the institution’s use of the cruel forced swim test.
During these widely discredited tests, experimenters induce panic in vulnerable small animals—including rats and mice—by putting them into inescapable cylinders of water, where they swim for fear of drowning. They attempt to climb the steep sides of the cylinder and even dive underwater to look for an escape. Once the test is complete, experimenters often kill the animals. The experiment is often conducted under the erroneous assumption that it can reveal something about mental health conditions in humans.
“Years ago, I played the Grand High Witch in The Witches, and this wicked experiment sounds like something she would have concocted!” writes Huston. “The misguided claim that the forced swim test may provide information about stress-related conditions in humans is nothing more than hocus-pocus. What it’s really doing is frightening defenseless animals and getting in the way of the development of much-needed, effective treatments for mental health conditions.”
Many large 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 urging pharmaceutical giant Sanofi to do the same.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
