Photos: PETA ‘Mouse’ Gives Out Free Face Masks – With a Message

Photos: PETA ‘Mouse’ Gives Out Free Face Masks – With a Message

Bath – Today – as COVID-19 cases are rising in the area and the government is “strongly advising” that staff and students wear face coverings on university campuses – a PETA supporter in a mouse costume scurried around Bath spreading information, not germs, by giving out free face masks featuring an image of a mouse trying desperately to stay afloat. The masks take a jab at the University of Bath for continuing to use the widely discredited forced swim test, in which experimenters put mice or other small animals who may or may not have been dosed with a substance into inescapable beakers of water and record how long they swim, on the assumption that the time it takes for the animals to start floating will reveal something about depression and other conditions in humans.

Images from the giveaway are also available here.

The mask giveaway is part of PETA’s campaign to urge the University of Bath to reject this flawed experiment and embrace superior, non-animal research.

“Human depression has nothing to do with the length of time frantic mice can keep their heads above water,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA hopes kind people will help mice and keep themselves and others safe by wearing these face masks with pride.”

Following discussions with PETA entities, 15 companies and two universities, including King’s College London, have declared that they don’t intend to use the forced swim test in the future.

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:
Sascha Camilli +44 (0) 20 7923 6244; [email protected]

#