A.G.’s Decision: University of Kentucky Must Hand Over Animal-Experimentation Records to PETA
PETA Prevails in Appeal Seeking Details About Animals Used and Killed in Archaic Classroom Experiments
For Immediate Release:
June 22, 2015
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway has ruled in PETA’s favor against the University of Kentucky (UK), confirming that it violated the Kentucky Open Records Act by refusing to comply with PETA’s August 2014 request for records related to its use of animals in classroom laboratories and training exercises.
The UK must now provide PETA with instructor and course names as well as protocols describing classroom experiments on animals, which PETA will use to determine whether the UK is still using animals when superior and humane non-animal teaching methods are available. If this is the case, the group will offer to donate cruelty-free replacements.
“The public has a right to know if the University of Kentucky is harming and killing animals in classrooms and training laboratories when modern and educationally superior teaching methods could be used instead,” says PETA Director of Laboratory Investigations Justin Goodman. “These documents will provide transparency to government operations and hopefully help save animals’ lives, improve students’ education, and save the state money.”
In its denial of PETA’s records request, the UK claimed that its teaching protocols were intellectual property and somehow novel. But its course descriptions and syllabi mention experiments that are basic, common, and widely cited in textbooks—such as muscle contraction and nerve physiology experiments in which animals are dismembered and have their muscles and nerves removed and attached to electrical currents. Modern interactive computer simulations are available for these lessons and are not only more effective and humane but also less expensive.
Copies of PETA’s appeal and the attorney general’s ruling are available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
