Kategorie: Animals

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PETA supporters armed with signs reading, “Ban the animal torture,” confronted University of Bristol (England) Vice-Chancellor and President Evelyn Welch during an alumni event at the Raines Law Room lounge to expose the institution’s shameful refusal to ban the forced swim test.

The activists filled the room chanting, “Ban the forced swim test now!” before being escorted out by security. Video footage of the disruption is available here.

In the widely discredited tests, experimenters induce panic in vulnerable small animals such as rats by dropping them into inescapable cylinders of water, forcing them to swim. Terrified of drowning, they attempt to climb the sides of the container and even dive underwater looking for a way out. Experimenters believe this can somehow reveal something about human mental health conditions. And they kill the animals when they are done with them—either by gassing them, inflicting blunt-force trauma to the head, inducing anaesthetic overdose, or breaking their necks—and then study their brains.

“The forced swim test does not translate to humans, yet the University of Bristol continues to defend it,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Emily Trunnell. “PETA is calling on Vice-Chancellor Welch to join the rest of the U.K.’s top universities in dropping this cruel and pointless experiment.”

Among others, the universities of Liverpool, Brighton, Exeter, Manchester, Nottingham, Southampton, and Newcastle University and King’s College London indicated they neither use the near-drowning test nor intend to do so 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 on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

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Below, please see a statement from PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman in response to SeaWorld’s opening of a park in Abu Dhabi:

If SeaWorld can build an abusement park in Abu Dhabi, it could build a seaside sanctuary, and the only reason it doesn’t is corporate greed. With even the notorious Miami Seaquarium planning to send the orca Lolita to a sanctuary, PETA is calling on SeaWorld to stop finding new ways to squeeze money out of captive animals and new continents for its tawdry dolphin-exploiting shows.

Among the 24 dolphins SeaWorld secretly shipped to Abu Dhabi is a female named Alice, who was “rescued” in 2007 and imprisoned in a concrete cell at SeaWorld San Antonio. Alice was forcibly bred in the company’s dolphin-breeding program, in which staff pull female dolphins out of the water—sometimes after drugging them so that they can’t fight back—and shove tubes filled with semen into their uteruses. Alice gave birth to two calves after being impregnated via this forced insemination.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

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Amid reports that police are investigating a case involving two St. Teresa’s Academy students who allegedly killed a duckling and dumped the body in the school bathroom, TeachKind—PETA’s humane education division—sent an urgent letter today to St. Teresa’s President Dr. Siabhan May-Washington along with kindness-to-animals curricula and Empathy Now, a guide to preventing violence by young people.

According to news sources, two sophomores are believed to have killed the duckling, whose body was discovered by other students at the all-girls, college-preparatory high school—with a string around the animal’s neck—inside a trashcan in the bathroom.

“This vulnerable duckling’s death, apparently at the hands of two students, sent shockwaves through St. Teresa’s Academy and illustrates exactly why young people must be taught empathy for animals from an early age,” says PETA Senior Director of Youth Programs Marta Holmberg. “Compassion can be cultivated, and TeachKind is on standby to help teach young people that violence is wrong, whether the victim is a duck or a classmate.”

Sandy Hook Promise lists cruelty to animals on its “10 Critical Warning Signs of Violence” list, and research shows that approximately 43% of perpetrators of school shootings first committed acts of cruelty against animals—so animal abusers potentially pose a serious threat to the community at large. TeachKind resources would be easily integrated into the school’s existing curriculum to help prevent future violence.

TeachKind—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. Its other free resources include a high school social justice curriculum (Challenging Assumptions) and the Share the World program kit for young children.

For more information, please visit TeachKind.org or follow the group on Facebook or Instagram.

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