The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
PETA: Birds tormented in experiments
University says animals are cared for appropriately
NEW HAVEN » Calling her experiments on wild house sparrows inhumane and cruel, a small group from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protested a Yale University postdoctoral student’s research methods Wednesday.
Christine Lattin, who began her studies into the stress response of sparrows at Tufts University, came to Yale in 2014. The protest was held outside the Yale Positron Emission Tomography Research Center at 801 Howard Ave.
“Christine Lattin has been tormenting wild birds since 2008,” Katerina Davidovich, a PETA campaigner, alleged. “She traps them and takes them to her lab. She injects them with chemicals to destroy their adrenal system and then intentionally torments them to stress them out.
“The results are totally inapplicable to humans or other bird species, so this is just a shameless waste of lives,” Davidovich said. She called Lattin’s work “curiosity experiments.”
On her website, Lattin described the purpose of her research: “While stress helps animals and humans survive and cope with challenges, too much stress is bad and leads to health problems. Understanding stress in wild animal populations is important because stressors like habitat destruction, climate change, and species invasions now affect most, if not all, animal species.”
She wrote that she chose house sparrows because “they have been so successful at invading new habitats” and so demonstrate “stress resilience.”
On her web page, she describes adding crude oil to the birds’ feed to test how animals might respond to oil spills; and using a biopsy punch to make a small wound in sparrows’ legs to see “how stress hormone receptors in the skin change during the healing process.” Lattin wrote that the birds were anesthetized during the procedure, which PETA disputes.
Davidovich claimed that Lattin also induces stress in the birds by rattling their cages every two minutes or keeping them confined in a cloth bag for 30 minutes. The sparrows are euthanized at the end of the experiments, PETA says.
“The public deserves to know what happens behind closed doors,” Davidovich said. “The federal Animal Welfare Act offers little protection in general and doesn’t protect birds at all.”
PETA filed a complaint in May with Marian Ryan, the district attorney in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, claiming that Lattin violated that state’s animal cruelty laws while at Tufts. According to PETA, most states exempt scientific research in their animal cruelty laws, but Massachusetts does not.
Lattin’s research “appears to be in flagrant violation of Massachusetts’ established public policy promoting humane treatment of animals, as well as of Massachusetts’ statutory prohibitions on inflicting unnecessary cruelty on animals,” attorney Elisabeth Custalow wrote in the complaint.
A message was left Wednesday with Ryan’s office to determine whether any action had been taken on the complaint. The call was not immediately returned.
“The only hope for birds right now is through that Massachusetts state law,” Davidovich said.
On her website, Lattin describes how she worked with an engineering student to design a three-dimensionally printed device to hold anesthetized sparrows during PET and CT scans.
“Scans last 30-60 minutes, and sparrows wake up afterwards and are hopping around their cages within minutes,” Lattin’s web page says. “PET-CT imaging allows us to use fewer animals in our research, and to see how levels of a particular receptor, for example, can predict stress resilience in the lab or in the wild. These technologies will also make it possible for us to image the animals, release them back into the wild, and then follow them over time.”
She wrote that “every study I do must first be approved by a university Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee . ... My work complies with all existing laws and regulations and the Ornithological Council’s Guidelines for the Use of Wild Birds in Research.”
The Register requested comment from both Lattin and Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications. University spokeswoman Karen Peart responded:
“Yale takes seriously its responsibility for the appropriate care of animals; our laboratories comply with or exceed all federal regulations and independent accreditation standards. As we continue to advance scientific knowledge and modern medicine, providing hope for millions of patients and their families, Yale scientists will sustain their commitment to the appropriate use of animals in research. Our faculty members employ animals only when there are no alternative models for advancing their research.
“Dr. Lattin’s research represents a valuable contribution to a growing body of knowledge that will help advance, among other things, veterinary medicine, animal conservation and animal model development. Those individuals who have responsibility for the oversight of animal care at the University have found that all of her research activities were approved and there was no evidence of non-compliance or inappropriate care. These findings were shared with the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, a federal agency within the Department of Health & Human Services, and they concurred that the allegations could not be substantiated and found no cause for further action by their office.”