For Immediate Release:
January 11, 2022
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Baton Rouge, La. – Today, the 19th Judicial District Court for the Parish of East Baton Rouge ruled that Louisiana State University (LSU) must turn over to PETA all the records that the group had requested related to LSU experimenter Christine Lattin’s taxpayer-funded experiments on sparrows.
PETA filed its lawsuit in December 2020 after the school refused to release public documents, including veterinary care records and videos recorded by Lattin, whose experiments involve trapping sparrows, pumping them with sex hormones, exposing them to terrifying calls from predators, and then killing them. After PETA filed the lawsuit, LSU provided the group with just some of the documents—now, it must provide them all.
“LSU was happy to spend tax dollars on killing birds, but it fought tooth and nail against releasing videos of their torment,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “With these records in hand, PETA looks forward to showing the public exactly how small birds live and die for Christine Lattin’s pointless experiments.”
In recent years, Lattin has tested birds’ fear of unfamiliar objects (“neophobia”) by withholding food from them for 15 hours and then putting random items—such as blinking lights, pink puffs, and a blue cocktail umbrella—near their food dishes to see how readily the birds would approach. Lattin then killed them and examined their brains.
PETA along with local counsel—Alysson Mills and Kristen Amond of Mills & Amond LLP—filed the lawsuit against the LSU Board of Supervisors and Thomas Galligan, individually and in his capacity as then-president of LSU, as the school’s designated records custodian under Louisiana law.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram or click here.
