New PETA Ad Calls Out Hypocrisy at LSU

For Immediate Release:
December 29, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Lafourche Parish, La. –

PETA is using Louisiana State University (LSU) experimenter Christine Lattin’s own words against her in a new ad running in today’s Daily Comet. The ad features a tweet from Lattin—“Are there any ways we could make our campus more bird safe?”—contrasted with her own deadly experiments on birds.

PETA is running the ad in Lafourche Parish because—according to state documents obtained by PETA—it’s among the parishes in which Lattin has been capturing sparrows for her experiments, which involve pumping the birds with sex hormones, exposing them to terrifying calls from predators, and then killing them.

“For a decade, Christine Lattin has captured, terrified, tormented, and killed wild-caught birds in experiments that don’t apply to humans or even other bird species,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is rallying the kind people of Lafourche Parish to reject this indefensible cruelty to animals.”

Earlier this month, PETA filed a lawsuit that seeks to compel LSU to disclose records, as required by the Louisiana Public Records Act, related to Lattin’s experiments. The university has delayed and refused to release documents, in apparent defiance of state laws. PETA has also asked the Office of the Parish Attorney in Baton Rouge to investigate Lattin’s apparent violation of the Baton Rouge bird-protection ordinance, which clearly states that it is “unlawful to trap, hunt, shoot or molest” birds. Although the city council added a loophole in March—apparently under pressure from the university—that permits capturing, tormenting, and killing birds for experiments, records obtained by PETA indicate that Lattin may have violated the ordinance prior to its modification.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.