Today is officially Day 1 of Our Biggest Exposé Yet!

At NZAVS, we’re celebrating Christmas in a unique, but important, way this year - by releasing our BIGGEST EXPOSÉ EVER!

We’ve recently discovered a lot of horrific animal experiments happening at University of Otago and, despite our objections, they’ve put their proverbial ‘foot on the pedal’ by opening a brand new $50 million NZD animal research facility to ramp up their barbaric testing.

At NZAVS, we dream of a world without animal testing, but sadly, this is simply not the case. In fact, every year thousands of animals in New Zealand are subjected to cruel and unthinkable experiments.

Today, we’re exposing one of the animal experiments being undertaken at the University of Otago, to try and ‘test the effects of alcohol on the adolescent brain’.

The experiment:

• Newborn rats were marked by punching holes into their ears and marking their paws.

• They were separated from their mothers at just 25 days old and subjected to three different treatments.

• Several rats were purposely killed by draining their hearts of blood, their heads were cut off so that their brains could be dissected.

• Test group one was left alone for the experiment.

• Test group two was repeatedly force-fed with alcohol. Here, a steel tube was forced down their throats and alcohol was directly injected into their stomach - 9g/kg of alcohol was given within 45 min. This would be like forcing an 80kg human to drink more than 2 liters of vodka.

  Five rats fell into a coma from this and were killed and it doesn’t stop there. This procedure done incorrectly resulted in the death of 8 rats, most likely due to a rupture or to fluid getting into their lungs… a truly horrible way to die.

  The second steel gavage needle pictured below is what was used to force feed these animals. This image was taken directly from the publication containing the experiments we are exposing:

• Test group three was repeatedly force-fed with a saline solution.

• The rats were later subjected to several behavioural tests, including the notorious Water Maze Test where they were forced to swim in a cloudy pool in search of a hidden platform

Imagine being forced to swim in a cloudy pool of water with a hidden platform that you have to find to climb on to escape swimming…again and again for several days. All to see if you could remember where the platform is...

Then one day, there would be no platform, no way to escape the water. Instead you’d frantically swim around and around the pool, looking for a way out. Would you give up looking for the platform? That’s what the researchers want to know.

All this to try and measure the effects of alcohol on the cognitive development of the young rats, as proof against teen binge drinking. As if we needed more proof.

Since the University of Otago wouldn’t dare supply us with real footage, we’ve have to create a visual representation of what these animals would have gone through using footage taken overseas (Caution! The video is graphic and difficult to watch):

We all know that alcohol has a negative impact on human development, so what was the point of this test?

It’s pretty clear from the reports that the main purpose of this study was to provide content for a masters student’s thesis. The actual results of the experiment didn’t find anything of value and there were so many errors during the animal testing that the entire study was inconclusive and completely unnecessary.

We’ve made it plain and simple: NZAVS is going above Otago Uni in our mission to end animal experimentation… and we need your help! 

Here are three ways you can help today:

1. Donate now to help us expose even more experiments. Discovering all of these horrible tests is definitely the worst part of our job at NZAVS. But it’s important work that must be done! We’ll send you an A4 fine print to display at your home or office.

2. Buy a Rat Lover’s Pack from our Holiday Gift Guide. This donation will help us end experiments on rats. As a way of saying ‘thank you’, we’ll send you a special-edition A4 poster and a postcard to give to your loved ones this Christmas.

3. Sign our petition to end animal experimentation in New Zealand: Help us by calling on the New Zealand Government to start prioritising non-animal-based research methods and replacing the use of animals in science!

Find out more

• Learn more about our 12 Days of Christmas campaign, which is exposing more cruelty at Otago. We will be uploading a new experiment that we are exposing to this page every day until the 12^th December.
• Read more about this story in the media. 
• Access the the full paper we have exposed above on our references page.