PETA Urges Funding Cuts for Aussie Animal Strangulation Tests at Monash University

For Immediate Release:
December 10, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Melbourne, Australia –

PETA U.S. and PETA Australia today renew calls for retractions of Monash University research papers, including one published last month, and a cut in taxpayer funding after its authors failed to adequately defend their cruel experiments, which involve strangling rats, bashing them over the head with weights, and forcing them to swim until exhaustion, supposedly to mimic human domestic abuse.

In a joint letter sent to the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the PETA entities demand the organization follows its policy to discourage funding applications for forced-swim experiments and also add strangulation and traumatic brain injury tests to that policy. A second letter to scientific publisher Elsevier presents evidence that the experiments didn’t adhere to ethical guidelines or the journal’s policies and urges it to pull the university’s papers and prohibit publication of similar experiments in the future.

A third letter to Monash University points out the many scientific and ethical problems with these experiments and urges it to switch to cutting-edge, human-relevant research that doesn’t use animals.

An image from Monash scientists’ paper showing a rat being strangled. Modified from Figure 1 in Sun et al., 2025. Pathophysiology, blood biomarkers, and functional deficits after intimate partner violence-related brain injury: Insights from emergency department patients and a new rat model. Brain Behav Immun. doi: 10.1016/j.bbi.2024.09.030. | *Deed – Attribution 4.0 International – Creative Commons*

“Even a child could see that slamming weights onto animals’ heads to cause brain damage and choking the life out of them is cruelty, not science,” says PETA U.S. Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA calls on the NHMRC to stop throwing money at these disgusting experiments, Elsevier to stop publishing them, and Monash University to stop tormenting animals and switch to state-of-the-art research that actually helps humans.”

Rats are highly intelligent and social animals who show love to their families, form complex social structures, and bond easily with human guardians. At Monash University, experimenters dropped weights on pregnant rats’ heads, causing severe eye injuries and likely brain damage, denied them adequate pain relief, and strangled some before killing them all.

In another test, experimenters strangled dozens of adolescent female rats for 90 agonizing seconds with a weighted band, applying a force about three times the rat’s body weight. Other rats were violently hit in the head with a weight to inflict traumatic brain injury. Some endured both abuses, others were resuscitated after being strangled, and all were killed at the end.

In a third test published last month, experimenters subjected female rats to traumatic brain injury without pain relief and strangled the animals for 90 seconds daily for five days before injecting them with a psychedelic drug and killing them.

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.