Campaign Updates: Utah State University Torments Rats in Psychology Course
Semester after semester, undergraduate students at Utah State University (USU) who are enrolled in a course called Advanced Analysis of Behavior (PSY 3400) are required to lock rats inside barren boxes where the animals are trained to push a lever to receive food pellets, all while being bombarded with bursts of bright light—even though numerous animal-free teaching methods exist. PETA is demanding an end to this pointless cruelty, and you can help.
PETA Dispatches Letters to USU Officials Urging Animal-Free Psychology Course
November 10, 2025
PETA is again urging Utah State University to end its cruel use of live rats in the undergraduate psychology course “Analysis of Behavior: Advanced” (PSY 3400), and to adopt modern, non-animal teaching methods. In a letter to Brad Mortenson , the newly appointed university president, PETA calls on him to end the use of live animals in PSY 3400. PETA also encourages Walker to champion the transition to animal-free tools widely used by peer institutions. In a separate letter to the student body president, Brandon Sorensen, PETA reiterated that the university’s continued use of live rats is unnecessary, creates avoidable risk, and fails to meet the standards of a 21st-century education.
PETA Calls for Federal Probe after Injured Rat Apparently Given No Pain Relief at Utah State University
March 27, 2025
Utah State University, where undergraduate psychology students torment rats in archaic and pointless classroom experiments, continues to prove its disregard for animal welfare, so PETA is calling on the feds to step in. PETA recently obtained university records showing that a laboratory staff member noticed a possible fracture in the tail of one of the rats used in the school’s PSY 3400 course. That employee relayed the injury to a graduate student. That person told two others. At that point, although the tail injury was obvious, records make no mention of any pain medication or treatment being administered. As if that weren’t bad enough, no one bothered to reexamine the animal for another 29 days.
Shrugging your shoulders at an animal’s pain is unacceptable. It indicates serious problems at the school’s animal care and use program. Since the university apparently has not followed federal animal welfare regulations, PETA has asked the National Institutes of Health, which oversees animal welfare guidelines to which the school is obligated to adhere, to investigate and sanction the university, if warranted, for allowing this to happen.
USU Professor Urges University to Ban Animals in Psych Course
May 1, 2024
In her op-ed published in The Herald Journal, USU professor Michelle Rossi criticizes the cruel and unnecessary use of animals in the school’s Advanced Analysis of Behavior course. Students are required to place rats in stressful conditions in attempts to learn about psychology in humans and other animals.
“I also believe that our school is failing some Aggies by forcing them to perform cruel experiments on animals to pass a class.”
—Professor Michelle Rossi, USU
