criterion of preferring a sweet solution over ethanol. While there is evidence that the alcohol-preferring P rat line meets the criterion of a preference for ethanol in the presence of another palatable solution (see McMillen and Williams, 1995 for discussion on this latter criterion) and other putative animal models of alcoholism do not meet this criterion, Overstreet et al. (2007) make a cogent argument that the preference for ethanol over a third choice of a palatable solution may be overly simplistic when differentiating animal models of alcoholism. In addition, it has been proposed that an animal model of alcoholism should respond similarly to pharmacological treatments found to effectively reduce ethanol intake in humans and other preclinical models (i.e., predictive validity/pharmacological validation: Dyr and Kostowski, 2008; Overstreet et al., 2007; see Litten et al., 2012 for a discussion on the development of medications and screening models targeting alcoholism). This criterion and these compounds are discussed in Section 5.8.
