VICTORY! University of Melbourne Bans Near-Drowning Tests on Animals After PETA Push

For Immediate Release:
December 10, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

After hearing from PETA entities worldwide, Australia’s Animal-Free Science Advocacy, and more than 12,000 PETA members and supporters, the University of Melbourne has confirmed it has prohibited the widely discredited and cruel forced swim test.

In the test, experimenters dose mice, rats, or other small animals with a substance, place them in inescapable beakers of water, and force them to swim to keep from drowning. Supposedly, this sheds light on human depression. Numerous scientists have debunked the test as a poor model of depression and warned that using it could rule out new, effective drugs for human patients.

“Forcing terrified animals to swim for their lives is both abysmally cruel and utterly irrelevant to human depression,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Advisor Mimi Bekhechi. “The University of Melbourne joins many forward-thinking universities and pharmaceutical companies in ending this atrocity, and PETA now calls on pharma giant Novartis and other institutions to follow suit.”

Academic institutions that have pledged not to use the forced swim test include the University of Western Australia, Griffith University, Macquarie University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of South Australia, as well as more than a dozen universities in the UK. Most top pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Bayer, and others, have also banned the test after hearing from PETA entity scientists.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.