Boehringer Ingelheim Ends ‘Despair Test’ on Animals
PETA Celebrates As Major Pharmaceutical Company Abandons Cruel, Controversial Forced Swim Test
For Immediate Release:
July 25, 2019
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Following an appeal from PETA, Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) has confirmed that it will no longer use or fund the widely discredited forced swim (or “despair”) test, in which mice, rats, and other small animals are placed in inescapable beakers filled with water and made to swim to keep from drowning.
BI—a Fortue 500 pharmaceutical company—joins Roche, Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, and DSM in ending its use of this test, and PETA is now calling on Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer to follow suit.
Between 1993 and 2018, BI published or funded at least 12 studies that describe the use of the forced swim test in experiments involving more than 1,300 mice and rats. Not one of the compounds that was tested in these experiments is currently approved to treat human depression.
“PETA applauds Boehringer Ingelheim for banning this bogus experiment,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Emily Trunnell. “PETA urges Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Bristol-Myers Squibb to join the pharmaceutical industry’s growing movement to stop using terrifying animals in pointless tests.”
Some experimenters had claimed that the forced swim test served as a model of depression in animals and could be used to test the effectiveness of new medications for the condition, but scientists refute this. PETA scientists reviewed published studies and found that dropping animals into water this way was less predictive than a coin toss of a drug’s effectiveness in humans. Animals used in these tests frantically try to escape by attempting to climb up the sides of the beakers or even diving underwater in search of an exit. They paddle furiously, desperately trying to keep their heads above water. Eventually, most start to float.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
