PETA Sues UMass Campuses for Hiding Names, Activities of Animal Experiment Oversight Committee Members

For Immediate Release:
October 6, 2026

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Today, PETA filed public records lawsuits in Suffolk County Superior Court against the University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass-Amherst) and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (UMass Chan), arguing they are refusing to release public information about the schools’ Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUC), which review and approve experiments on animals.

PETA contends that the public has a right to know who serves on these federally required committees, what actions they take at their monthly meetings, and whether they are properly qualified for their roles, because both are public universities funded in part by federal dollars.

In January, PETA requested the names of UMass Chan’s IACUC members, along with its meeting notices, agendas, and minutes. The suit details that UMass Chan first told PETA it would release the members’ names, then reversed course and refused, claiming privacy and security exemptions under the Massachusetts Public Records Law shielded the information.

As detailed in the complaint against UMass Amherst, PETA requested IACUC meeting minutes in October 2025. The school turned them over in March 2026 but redacted the initials of committee members everywhere except the attendance record, shielding their identities from the public, and also redacted additional information about the IACUC’s activities, claiming exemptions for withholding “deliberative” material and “trade secrets.”

PETA argues that those exemptions don’t cover this information and that Massachusetts law presumes such records are public unless the school can prove otherwise. 

A dog used for experimentation in a kennel at UMass-Chan. Photo: PETA

“Committee members are public employees at public universities, and the law is clear that the people paying the bills have a right to know who’s making decisions about animals’ lives behind laboratory doors,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is going to court to drag these committees out of the shadows and hold UMass to the same transparency standard the law demands of every taxpayer-funded institution.”

These lawsuits are not PETA’s first fight with UMass over IACUC secrecy. After years of litigation, UMass Amherst settled a lawsuit with PETA in 2025, agreeing to release all public records PETA had sought, hand over the names of all 2025 IACUC members, and pay $50,000 toward PETA’s legal fees and costs. After this settlement, PETA submitted another public records request to UMass-Amherst for the IACUC’s meeting minutes, which in part led to today’s lawsuit against UMass-Amherst.

A similar multi-lawsuit transparency battle with the University of Washington forced the school to release the names of its committee members. In that matter, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that releasing IACUC member names does not violate their right to privacy, as this information is considered “basic ‘biographical data’” that is not highly sensitive.

At UMass Amherst, experimenters zip-tied small marmoset monkeys into restraining devices, drilled into their skulls, implanted electrodes, cut open the monkeys’ necks to expose muscle and electrode leads, cut out the monkeys’ ovaries, heated the animals with hand warmers to mimic “hot flashes,” then killed and dissected them in gruesome menopause experiments that ended in 2025 after years of sustained pressure from PETA.

UMass Chan experimenters use cats, hamsters, mice, rats, pigs, and other animals. They slice open dogs to induce strokes, infect animals with blood-sucking parasites, breed animals to suffer painful neurodegenerative diseases, inject chemicals into their brains, and more.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.