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NSF: Stop Funding LSU’s Brain-Damage Experiments on Birds

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Update (September 26, 2023): Louisiana State University tried to stop the public from seeing certain records about experiments on animals. But a court has sided largely with PETA, ordering the university to hand over documents and various videos relating to Christine Lattin’s torturous experiments. Read more here.

Louisiana State University (LSU) experimenter Christine Lattin is planning to trap house sparrows in their habitat and cage them in her Baton Rouge laboratory, where she’ll inject their brains with chemicals to temporarily stop activity in part of the brain. She’ll then expose the brain-damaged sparrows to unfamiliar objects that may frighten them, just to see how they react. When she’s done, she’ll kill them and chop up their brains.

This isn’t Lattin’s first time terrorizing birds for “science.” In previous experiments concerning neophobia, or the fear of new things, she imprisoned birds and deprived them of food for up to 15 hours to make them so desperate for food that they would approach unfamiliar objects. Even though they were famished, many birds were reluctant to eat. Now, she’s planning to kidnap sparrows and do similar experiments on them. After potentially months of holding them in stressful captivity, she’ll kill every bird in her laboratory.

Birds deserve to fly free, live in their nests, and care for their families—not be traumatized by experimenters. Lattin claims that her experiments reveal how animals respond to stressors, but different species react to stress in different ways. She wants to record wild sparrows’ natural responses to stressors, but she plans to lock them up in unnatural environments, which could change their behavior.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has actually awarded her a $1 million grant—even though these experiments are cruel and unnecessary.

Tell NSF to STOP funding them now!

View Message +

Dr. Sethuraman

Panchanath

National Science Foundation

Message to {contact_data~firstName} {contact_data~lastName}:

I was shocked and disturbed to learn that the National Science Foundation is funding Louisiana State University experimenter Christine Lattin’s cruel neophobia experiments on intelligent and sensitive house sparrows. For the sake of both ethics and sound science, I urge you to stop now.

Capture and confinement alone are enough to cause severe stress in these birds, who are ill-prepared to exist in a sterile laboratory environment, where they can’t fly or engage in normal social behavior. That they’ll then be inflicted with brain damage, subjected to fear- and stress-inducing tests, and finally killed is simply unconscionable.

The dubious scientific relevance of these experiments makes these animals’ suffering and death all the more inexcusable. Because species exhibit such a wide range of behavioral and physiological responses to stress, Lattin’s experiments don’t even reliably indicate other birds’ stress responses, let alone other types of animals’. Holding the sparrows in an unnatural laboratory environment for an extended period, as Lattin does, likely further reduces the applicability of her results to wild populations.

These cruel and worthless experiments don’t deserve a single penny, let alone more than a million dollars snatched from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers. Please stop funding them immediately.

Sincerely,
{user_data~First Name} {user_data~Last Name}
{user_data~EMail Address}

Urge NSF to Stop Funding Lattin’s Cruel Tests

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NSF: Stop Funding LSU’s Brain-Damage Experiments on Birds

Tell NSF to STOP funding them now!

Urge NSF to Stop Funding Lattin’s Cruel Tests

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