Faeces Flood at University of Bristol Prompts Clean-Up Offer From PETA

Faeces Flood at University of Bristol Prompts Clean-Up Offer From PETA

Animal protection group offers to cover plumbing costs if the university “cuts the crap” and drops cruel animal experiment

Bristol – Following reports that a University of Bristol library was flooded with faeces, PETA has sent a letter to its vice chancellor, Professor Hugh Brady, with a cheeky proposal. The group has offered to pay for the clean-up and plumbing repairs if the university agrees to cut the crap and stop using the forced swim test on animals.

The proposal is part of PETA’s campaign to urge the University of Bristol to reject this cruel experiment and embrace superior, non-animal research.

“The forced swim test has been thoroughly debunked and exposed as cruel … yet the University of Bristol is still inexplicably blocking progress on this issue,” writes PETA Vice President Elisa Allen. “Following discussions with PETA UK and other PETA entities, 15 companies and three other universities have said that they will not use the forced swim test – it’s time for the University of Bristol to move with the times, too.”

In the widely discredited test, experimenters place rats into inescapable beakers of water and watch them desperately swim in search of an escape, on the assumption that the time it takes for the animals to stop swimming and start floating can tell us something about mental health conditions in humans. Once the test is complete, experimenters kill the rats – by gassing, blunt force trauma to the head, an overdose of anaesthetics, or breaking their necks – to study their brains.

The letter is available here. PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Contact:

Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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