Dancing ‘CrapStick’ to Protest Pfizer’s Animal Tests

PETA Will Call On Company to Ban Near-Drowning Tests on Mice

For Immediate Release:
October 28, 2019

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Led by a giant dancing “CrapStick,” a group of PETA supporters will descend on the Groton offices of Pfizer—the maker of ChapStick—during the lunch hour to urge the company to ban the widely discredited forced swim (or “despair”) test.

When:    October 29, 12 noon

Where:    Pfizer, 280 Shennecossett Rd., Groton

During this test, mice and other small animals are placed in inescapable beakers filled with water and made to swim to keep from drowning, purportedly to shed light on human depression. The test is less accurate than a coin toss in determining the effectiveness of antidepressant medications. Pfizer has used at least 1,270 mice and rats in such experiments, and in the 18 years that publications show that the company has used the test, it hasn’t led to any marketable drugs to treat human depression.

“Nearly drowning mice is yesterday’s science, and Pfizer knows it,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Emily Trunnell. “PETA is calling on the company to join Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, and other leading pharmaceutical companies in ditching the forced swim test in favor of advanced, animal-free research methods that might actually help humans with depression.”

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.