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A behavioral assay that forces lab animals to swim for several minutes or until they sink is coming under increasing criticism from scientists and animal rights activists for being potentially both uninformative and cruel, according to a recent report in Nature (July 18). The forced-swim test, which involves making a rodent try to stay afloat in a tank of water and monitoring how much time it spends immobile, has long been a staple technique in research on depression and other mood disorders, but is now being phased out or discouraged by an increasing number of research institutions, funders, and pharmaceutical companies.
“The National Institute of Mental Health has for some time been discouraging the use of certain behavioral assays, including the forced swim and tail suspension test, as models of depression,” Joshua Gordon, director of NIMH, tells Nature in a statement. “While no single animal test ...
