Our results indicate that SD rats achieve high levels of ethanol consumption using the intermittent-access two-bottle choice drinking paradigm. A recent study reported the effectiveness of the intermittent model in inducing high ethanol preference in SD rats in short-term (2 weeks) and limited-access (3 hrs per day) regimens (Moorman and Aston-Jones, 2009), but in this present study we focused on long-term exposure. Using the intermittent-access drinking paradigm SD rats achieve high levels of ethanol consumption that are maintained over several weeks (4.8 ± 0.4 g/kg/24hr, 8 weeks) and do not need sucrose fading to initiate ethanol consumption. They reach similar consumption levels to Long-Evans rats (5–6 g/kg/24hr) trained in the same model while both strains consume slightly less than Wistar rats (6–8 g/kg/24hr). We found SD rats achieved BECs (6 to 122 mg/dl) that were similar to Long-Evans rats (10 to 100 mg/dl), indicating similar ethanol clearance between these strains. As noted in our previous work, Wistar rats have to consume more ethanol in order to reach similar BECs to Long-Evans rats which may, at least partially, explain the differences
