Due to the perceived complexity of alcoholism as a disease, differences of opinion as to etiology, treatment, and prevention, and ethical restrictions regarding human experimentation, the animal laboratory has been a particularly important site for the study of the phenomenon. In doing so, this paper will contribute to our understanding of the history of the science of alcohol use and abuse, a history that has been little explored, historians preferring to focus on the social and political debates surrounding the control of alcohol consumption. 205) asserting: “In few places has effort to establish an animal model been as extensive as in the specific pathology of alcoholism.” It will not restrict itself to the issue of choice of animal, as important as this is, but rather focus instead on the various techniques and methods used in order to realize an animal model of alcoholism. This paper will examine the enduring attempt to make alcoholics out of animals in the laboratory, Anthony Riley and Cora Lee Wetherington ( 1989, p. Lester had long been determined to add alcoholism to this list, his own research favoring the rat, the animal of choice in much of experimental psychology and physiology.

When reflecting on the use of animals in the medical sciences, biochemist David Lester considered them to have been critical to the study of reproductive physiology, cancer, gerontology, nutrition, albinism, and a whole range of disease processes from anemia to zoonosis, “the list … is long indeed, ranging from the cat to (probably) the zebu … but certainly including cattle, chickens, dogs, ducks, hamsters, horses, mink, mice, primates, rabbits, rats, sheep and swine” (Lester, 1982, p.

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