100-Year-Old LSU Alum’s Birthday Wish: Stop Cruel Bird Experiments!

Holly Reynolds Teams Up With PETA to Call On Louisiana State University to Pull the Plug on Experimenter’s Plans to Abuse and Kill Wild Birds

For Immediate Release:
December 14, 2018

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Today, Louisiana State University (LSU) alum Holly Reynolds—whose 100^th birthday is on Sunday—sent a letter on PETA’s behalf with a birthday request for her alma mater: Pull the plug on LSU Assistant Professor Christine Lattin’s harmful, ineffective experiments on wild-caught birds and redirect university resources to superior, non-animal research methods.

“Abusing animals in pointless experiments was wrong 100 years ago, and it’s no less so today,” writes Reynolds. “Please make my 100^th birthday a happy one by taking a stand against cruel experiments on wild sparrows at our university.”

In studies that don’t apply to humans or even to other bird species, Lattin has caught wild birds and wounded their legs, frightened them by rattling their cages and restraining them in cloth bags for 30 minutes at a time, fed them crude oil mixed with feed, and subjected them to injections that damaged their adrenal glands. After enduring these experiments, the birds were killed.

PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on.” For more information, please visit PETA.org.