Bad, Worse, Worst: LSU Ranked Among Animal Testing Offenders

PETA’s Interactive ‘Failed Tests’ Resource Calls Out School for Using Hundreds of Animals in Cruel Experiments

For Immediate Release:
September 3, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

As the new school year begins at Louisiana State University (LSU), PETA is alerting students to its new interactive feature, “Failed Tests,” which ranks colleges as “bad,” “worse,” or “worst” for animals—and LSU, which used hundreds of dogs; dozens of cats, rabbits, and monkeys; and many other animals in experiments last year, is among the “worse.”

LSU received $66 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2018, nearly half of which is estimated to have been directed toward experiments on animals. Last year, PETA learned that LSU’s School of Veterinary Medicine had, for years, purchased dogs from a local animal shelter for use in deadly training laboratories. That same year, the school hired Christine Lattin, a notorious experimenter who has caught birds in the wild, wounded their legs, frightened them by rattling their cages, restrained them in cloth bags for 30 minutes at a time, fed them crude oil, and subjected them to injections that damaged their adrenal glands. After being subjected to these painful and distressing procedures, the birds were killed.

“Students live and work on university campuses for years without knowing that animals are being burned, poisoned, crippled, blinded, and subjected to other cruel treatment right under their noses,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “As the new school year begins, PETA is asking caring LSU students to speak out against the abuse of sensitive, sentient beings in their midst.”

PETA points out that a 2018 Pew Research poll found that the majority of Americans oppose animal experimentation, with even greater opposition among younger demographics such as college students. No animal test is prohibited by law, no matter how painful or irrelevant, and mice, rats, birds, reptiles, and amphibians are excluded from protection under federal law.

Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic science research—much of it involving animal experimentation—fail to lead to treatments for humans. And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence toward other animals. For more information, please click here.