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The animal rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has recently sent a letter to the Pharmacy Council of India (PCI) for discontinuing the Forced Swim Test (FST) in thousands of pharmacy institutions across the country. The PCI has now circulated the PETA India’s request to all the pharmacy institutions in the country for necessary action. Forced Swim Test, also known as the Porsolt Swim Test, is dropping small animals such as mice and rats into inescapable tanks of water as part of experiment. Some experimenters claim that when animals spend more time floating (as opposed to trying to escape), they are more ‘depressed’, and they often use the test in an attempt to model human depression or test antidepressant drugs. But, animal activists contend that there is evidence to the contrary, and in reality, the Forced Swim Test is not scientifically credible and is deliberately cruel. That is why the Test has been abandoned or banned by most of major pharmaceutical companies, several academic institutions, and government jurisdictions. Major companies including Amgen, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol Myers Squibb, Bayer, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Astrea Therapeutics, Roche Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, NutriFusion and DSM Nutritional Products have either banned or discontinued the Test. The Australian Research Council and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council prohibited funding any experiments that use the Test, while AgResearch, a New Zealand government research institute that oversees the use of animals in experimentation for more than 40 other institutions in the country, revised its legally-binding code of conduct to state that its ethics committees will not consider an application that includes FST. Besides, several educational institutions, including 12 UK-based research universities, three medical research funding charities, universities in Australia and Colombia, among others have not been using the Test or no longer use the Test or fund experiments involving the FST.
There can be no two opinions about the fact that a large number of animals are mutilated, burnt, blinded, cut open, poisoned, and drugged in research laboratories every year. It is true that during the last several years, there have been controversies in the world on the issue of the role of animal experimentation in drug discovery. Millions of animals are routinely used every year in laboratories around the world to test the safety and efficacy of drugs for humans. It is true that all conventional drugs are tested on animals at some point as this is required by regulators and in many countries by legislation. It is also true that virtually all major medical advances for both humans and animals have been achieved through biomedical research by using animal models. But, the animal welfare group PETA wanted to revamp biomedical research and regulatory testing in India to phase out animal experiments in research laboratories. The supporters of animal welfare, euphemistically termed as animal activists, are of the view that most of the drug discoveries are possible without experimentations in animals and inflicting cruelty on them. They argue that not only are these tests cruel, their results are also inapplicable to humans because of the vast physiological differences among species. After several steps in the past to end experiments on animals, now the PETA India wanted discontinuing the Forced Swim Test in research laboratories. If the non-animal methods are effective in meeting learning objectives, facilitate repeatability of the experiment, improve students’ comprehension of experimental concepts, enhance their retention capacity, and bypass many other issues encountered when experimenting on animals, the PCI should seriously consider the PETA India’s request as it will spare the lives of countless animals nationwide.
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