News Archive - Page 46 of 122

SIVU 47: The pound and the authorities prefer to attack whistle-blowers than to resolve the problems highlighted

We are responding point by point to the SIVU 47 pound in Lot-et-Garonne that downplays its responsibilities.

Letter from the coalition of environmental, land and human rights civil society organisations in the Virunga landscape.

The coalition of environmental, land and human rights civil society organisations of the Virunga Landscape calls on the Presidents of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Rwanda to exercise greater caution in the face of hostilities in the great ape area of the Virunga Landscape.

Forced swimming: footage

Forced swimming: footage
17.06.2022
Forced swimming: footage
Animal testing

We talked about it in our previous post : the Ministry of Research has just approved a project that involves inflicting electric shocks and forced swimming on rodents. It is difficult to imagine the fear felt by these animals as they float in a bowl where they do not know if they can ever get out. The footage of their attempts to escape speaks volumes, however.

In 2015, the University of Alaska Fairbanks put videos online of lessons to teach students to correctly decipher the behaviours of rodents subjected to forced swimming tests. The professor described, in a completely detached way (or with an occasional smile), the mice’s attempts to get out of the container or to stay alive by floating.

Forced to swim and held up by their tails

In the second video, the mouse appears terrorised from the beginning, floating and defecating before starting to move, which the professor finds very interesting. He does not reveal that defecation is a long-known stress marker among mice – and does not do it more in the fourth video, faced with a mouse that alternates between floating and desperate attempts to escape from the container.

At the end of the last two videos, we see the professor’s hand retrieve the mice in the container by grabbing them by the tail – again, a practice known to generate stress for mice as well as rats.

The footage cannot show, and we cannot imagine, the terror felt by these mice when they are immersed in this container with no possibility of getting out. How can you not show minimal empathy watching four mice adopting four different strategies, four different reactions faced with this situation? These are in fact four individuals who very much want to get out of this container without knowing that they are entirely subject to the good will of the researcher.

This is happening in France

These practices do not disappear at the French border. Don’t forget about our previous blog, which talked about the authorisation of a new project of this kind this year by the Ministry of Research.

Between 2019 and 2022, we have found many publications from French teams having controlled the effects of molecules or genetic modifications specifically by using the forced swimming test*. Three cases deserve particular attention:

instead of one six-minute session, the Universities of Toulouse and Lyon 1 subjected the mice to a forced swim of ten minutes a day for five days in a row, with the idea of making it a better model for testing a medication;
elsewhere, the NutriNeuro team (INRAE/ Bordeaux University) worked with Activ’Inside (a company from the Bordeaux region that produces ingredients for sellers of ‘natural’ dietary supplements) for testing the effect of one of their ingredients (saffron) on depressive behaviours — showing that ‘natural’ health cannot mean that cruelty is not involved.
in a video article published at the end of 2021 and nicely entitled ‘The chronic despair model’, Strasbourg and Fribourg Universities showed procedures carried out over the last few years — the first two minutes of the video, available for free, show a part of what the rodents are subjected to in this context.

Animal Models of Depression – Chronic Despair Model (CDM)

Help us to put a stop to these tests

Rodents are incredible animals, they laugh, they play, they feel emotions as complex as regret and have an interest in their own lives. It is unacceptable that these tests carry on nowadays. We have no right to make these animals suffer for our own interests.

So that we can fight for the abolition of animal testing, we need to take care of our health. Everyone is likely to need medication at some point. Now, all branded drugs involve research using animals to develop them and require testing on animals to put them on the market. While waiting for a ban on animal testing, we therefore recommend, where possible, buying generic drugs, that can be put on the market without involving animal testing – which at least makes it a symbolic choice.

Over the next few weeks, we will tell you more about the international campaigns against the use of forced swimming and the alternatives worth considering to help people suffering with depression.

Join us in asking the Ministry of Research to forbid these tests.

Standard letter (download here) to be sent via the ministry form
By sending tweets to the ministry according to the models below:

Copy this posts on Twitter: Stop electric shocks and forced swimming for animals! Public authorities should not authorise such cruel experiments! @sup_recherche
https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: .@sup_recherche, France must commit, like laboratories abroad, to put an end to cruel forced swimming tests on mice and rats!
https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: Making rats depressed with electric shocks will not give more effective treatments! #EndAnimalTesting, @sup_recherche !
https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: Instead of torturing rats to produce yet more medications, train psychologists and psychiatrists with 21st century tools! @sup_recherche https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: Stop electric shocks and forced swimming! More funding for in vitro methods! @sup_recherche https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale #StopForcedSwimming

This article is the second in a series of five on forced swimming:

Electric shocks and forced swimming in France in 2022
Forced swimming: the images
Forced swimming: the companies that advance and the industry that resists
Forced swimming: other approaches are possible
Forced swimming: a long-term battle (to come)

* The recent publications are signed by teams from Neurolixis & Pierre Fabre, from the Institute of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Paris (Inserm U12266), from the Paris-Saclay University, from a coalition between the university hospital and universities supported by the French National Research Agency, from the Charles Gerhardt Institute and from Montpellier University, from the Neurocentre Magendie at Bordeaux University, from the Institute of Biology Paris-Seine, from the Côte d’Azur University, and many others.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

Jackdaws are being spared in Brittany!

One Voice has gone to the Rennes Administrative Tribunal for Western Jackdaws. They have just suspended the Côtes-d’Armor, Finistère, and Morbihan prefectural decrees, thus sparing these birds.

Official opening of the Chatipi for stray cats in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse, 14 June 2022 at 4pm

One Voice, who has fought against feline straying for years, is implementing three-way partnerships with towns or drop-in centres and local associations to microchip and neuter homeless cats and release them, while finding them a wooden chalet for them to rehydrate themselves, eat, and take comfort. The Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse commune in the Aude department contacted the One Voice Association to take charge of the issue of stray cats in the town. Amicale Féline de Lagrasse [the Lagrasse Feline Association], an animal protection association, is also participating in the project. The Chatipi programme therefore means that cats without a human family no longer suffer from deprivation. The official opening of the Chatipi will take place in Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse on 14 June 2022 at 4pm.

Electric shocks and forced swimming in France in 2022

Electric shocks and forced swimming in France in 2022
13.06.2022
Electric shocks and forced swimming in France in 2022
Animal testing

If you think forced swimming tests and electric shocks live in the past, you are going to need to reassess your position: despite the controversy of the subject, the Ministry of Research has just approved a project that is going to electrocute 600 rats repeatedly and force them to swim with no way out to study the way in which chronic stress can lead to depression. How can these practices be accepted in France in 2022?

You have probably already heard about ‘forced swimming’ tests, which involve putting a rodent in a container of water to observe how long they will struggle for and try to get out. The test generally lasts six minutes, an eternity during which the rodent cannot know if they are going to survive or end up drowning. First, they struggle, before abandoning the idea of getting out, then limiting themselves only to movements that are necessary to keep their head above the water.

During this time, they are filmed. Nowadays, the footage will be analysed by specialised software, developed by Bioseb in Vitrolles or Viewpoint in Lyon for example, to automatically decipher the behaviours observed, that are used to assess the ‘depression’ or the distress of these animals, most often to predict the effectiveness of antidepressant medications.

A new project approved in France

Thanks to the European Commission, France has finally published recent abstracts of projects involving the use of animals since 2022. I am sure you have understood: a project recently approved by the Ministry of Research is going to use the forced swimming test to study ‘the development of depressive symptoms brought on by chronic stress’.

In short, this is to say that 600 rats, after they have had cannulas implanted in their brains, will be subjected for two days straight to a fifty-minute session of ‘inescapable and unpredictable’ electric shocks.

Then the research team will assess their depressive behaviour and the effect of a molecule of interest with behavioural tests, including a fifteen-minute forced swimming test.

Help us to put a stop to these tests

It is unacceptable that these tests carry on nowadays. Rats are intelligent, playful animals and are sensitive to the needs of their companions. Sentient animals, in short. Nothing justifies using them for our own interests.

Over the next few weeks, we will tell you more about forced swimming, its practice in France, the international campaigns against its use, and the alternatives worth considering to help people suffering with depression.

Join us in asking the Ministry of Research to forbid these tests.

Standard letter (download here) to be sent via the ministry form
By sending tweets to the ministry according to the models below:

on cruelty

Copy this posts on Twitter: Stop electric shocks and forced swimming for animals! Public authorities should not authorise such cruel experiments! @sup_recherche https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

on alternatives

Copy this posts on Twitter: Stop electric shocks and forced swimming! More funding for in vitro methods! @sup_recherche
https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale #StopForcedSwimming

/ ? Electric shocks and learned helplessness — Inflicting electric shocks with no way out on animals is a common method in research on depression. ‘Learned helplessness’ was conceptualised by Martin Seligman and James Bruce Overmier in 1967 after they subjected dogs to inescapable electric shocks, observing afterwards that the dogs did not even make an effort to avoid new electric shocks in a situation where it was possible for them to do so. Their experiment was reproduced many times afterwards, using different animals, leading to numerous interpretations, and has been the basis of a model of depression that is well-used today on rodents. Electric shocks used to provoke learned helplessness are also part of the examples of ‘strict’ procedures provided under French regulation.

This article is the first in a series of five on forced swimming: