Victory! University of Washington Animal Oversight Committee to Reveal Members’ Full Names

For Immediate Release:
August 8, 2025

Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382

In a fifth legal win for PETA and public accountability, members of the University of Washington (UW) animal oversight committee will no longer hide their identities by using only their initials.

The Washington State Attorney General’s office informed PETA last night that committee members’ full names will now appear in public appointment letters, during meetings that are publicly streamed, and in meeting minutes. This will ensure that those who approve painful and often scientifically flawed experiments on animals can no longer remain anonymous.  

This latest victory involving PETA’s efforts to compel UW, a public institution, to be more transparent comes after PETA and Northwest Animal Rights Network said in a demand letter to state officials that hiding members’ identities was likely a violation of Washington law.

“The public has every right to know who oversees the painful and pointless experiments on animals happening in taxpayer-funded laboratories and whether the oversight committee is properly constituted,” says PETA Senior Science Advisor for Primate Issues Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “Animal experimentation committee members fought hard to operate in secrecy, but now if they rubber-stamp cruelty, the public will know exactly who signed off on it.”

This victory follows PETA’s win for transparency in April when the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington ruled that PETA and Northwest Animal Rights Network have a right to receive public records revealing the names of UW’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) members.

PETA previously secured three Ninth Circuit Court victories supporting arguments that IACUC members have no right under the U.S. Constitution to keep their identities secret.

UW’s IACUC is supposed to be the last line of defense for animals imprisoned in the university’s laboratories, yet its actions have led to animals being killed by irradiation, starvation, dehydration, strangulation, scalding, blood loss, 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.