Heads Up, Tigers! Sky-High PETA Plea at LSU Game to Expose School’s Grisly Experiments
For Immediate Release:
November 4, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Football fans attending Saturday’s sold-out Louisiana State University (LSU) game against the University of Alabama will catch a can’t-be-missed message, courtesy of a PETA banner that will fly over Tiger Stadium proclaiming, “LSU: Shut Down Cruel Songbird Lab!” PETA is rallying the community to contact LSU President William F. Tate IV and urge him to end Christine Lattin’s cruel and pointless publicly funded tests on songbirds.
For her experiments, Lattin has trapped sparrows, pumped them with sex hormones, and exposed them to predators’ terrifying calls. She has cut off baby birds’ heads in order to examine their brain tissue, and the birds she has abducted have suffered from severe psychological distress due to their sudden imprisonment—some have even died within a week.
“LSU’s Christine Lattin captures, torments, and kills songbirds in disgusting experiments,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA urges everyone who sees our banner to speak out against these cruel and deadly tests.”
In recent years, Lattin has tested birds’ fear of unfamiliar objects by withholding food from them for up to 15 hours and then putting random items—such as a blinking light, yellow pipe cleaners, or a blue cocktail umbrella—near their food dishes to see how readily the birds would approach. Lattin then killed them and examined their brains. In June 2019, the Louisiana Board of Regents awarded Lattin more than $117,000 to inflict psychological distress on animals, despite her failure to produce any real-world applications.
In August, the 19th Judicial District Court for the Parish of East Baton Rouge ordered LSU to pay $73,501.27 in attorney’s fees and costs to PETA after the school failed to release public records, including veterinary-care records and videos recorded by Lattin.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
