VICTORY! Near-Drowning Experiment on Animals Ended by Melior Discovery After PETA Push
For Immediate Release:
June 23, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
PETA announces today that Pennsylvania-based pharmaceutical research company Melior Discovery is no longer subjecting animals to the cruel and useless forced swim test, marking the 18th company to drop the widely debunked experiment following PETA’s global campaign.
In the forced swim test, also known as the “behavioral despair test,” experimenters dose mice, hamsters, or other small animals with a test substance, place them in inescapable beakers of water, and force them to swim to keep from drowning, supposedly to shed light on human depression. Numerous scientists have debunked this test as a poor model of depression, and using it could even rule out new drugs that may be effective in humans.
“Forcing terrified animals to swim for their lives is both abysmally cruel and utterly irrelevant to human depression,” says neuroscientist and PETA Director of Science Advancement and Outreach Dr. Emily Trunnell. “Melior Discovery made the right decision in dropping this absurd test, and PETA urges all other hold-out companies, like Novartis, to follow its lead.”
Melior Discovery joins numerous other companies that have banned the test after hearing from PETA, including Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, AbbVie, Sanofi, Roche, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk A/S, Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer, and Bristol Myers Squibb.
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.
