Zoinks!
To pull off this abomination, OHSU experimenters used 150 voles—small, socially monogamous mammals, similar to mice, who care for their young and protect their mates. They kept the voles in complete environmental impoverishment inside plastic shoeboxes.
Experimenters then paired males and females arbitrarily for just one week before separating them, after which the male voles had free access to water and alcohol. Some drank the equivalent of 15 bottles of wine daily, which you might do, too, if you were confined to a plastic box.
In one of a battery of tests—the “partner preference test”—experimenters put a male vole into a cage where his partner was tethered on one end and another female was tethered on the other end. Experimenters measured how much time the male spent with each female. This, the argument goes, is supposed to somehow shed light on alcohol’s effects on human male infidelity.
In the “resident intruder test,” the experimenters dropped a male vole into a cage to which another male vole was already confined and watched as the animals fought, counting how many times the “resident” would lunge at, bite, or chase the “intruder.”
OHSU experimenters killed all 150 voles and dissected their brains and the fetuses of any pregnant females at the end of the tests.