Campaign Updates: Monash University’s Deadly Rat Experiments
Experimenters at Australia’s Monash University bash the heads of rats with weights, inflicting traumatic brain injuries, in bizarre attempts to study the human health effects of domestic violence. Other rats are strangled nearly to death when experimenters hang weights from their necks, while some endure the widely discredited forced swim test. According to independent animal welfare experts, the experimenters denied some rats adequate pain relief, allowing dozens to suffer before being killed.
Please join us in urging an end to this violence.
PETA Ups Pressure on Monash U. to End Grotesque and Scientifically Bereft Tests
December 10, 2025
In separate letters, PETA once again urges Monash University to end its cruel intimate partner violence experiments on rats; calls on Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, which bankrolls the tests, to align its funding with its policies that discourage use of the archaic forced swim test that is used in these experiments; and demands that Elsevier, a journal publishing company, retract the scientifically flawed papers about these tests and agree never to publish similar experiments.
