PETA Knocks Down the Doors of Christine Lattin’s Laboratory
They tried to keep it secret—fought it all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court.
PETA persisted. Justice prevailed.
And now we’re opening the doors of Christine Lattin’s grotesque laboratory at Louisiana State University, bringing you records and video footage that reveal her cruelty to tiny songbirds in bizarre endeavors that bear no resemblance to science, along with her successful machinations to get a local law changed because it had become just too inconvenient.
No wonder the university wanted to keep this under wraps.
How Did We Get Here?
PETA knew that Lattin had trapped hundreds of wild birds for her curiosity-driven experiments since 2008.We knew that she pumped them full of drugs and hormones, fed them crude oil, wounded their legs, plucked their feathers, and subjected them to recorded predator sounds, among other types of torment. Few birds have made it out of her laboratory alive.
We wanted to see exactly how Lattin carried out her cruelty.
We requested public records, including video footage, from the university. It didn’t produce them. So in 2020, PETA sued. We won. But the school appealed. We won again. The school appealed again—this time to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which also sided with us.
The university was forced to turn over veterinary records for captured wild birds, videos of Lattin’s experiments, and records about her lobbying Baton Rouge officials to change the city’s bird protection ordinance, which prohibited trapping or harming wild birds. The law now exempts experimentation, thanks to her backroom dealings.
What We Found: The Video
Birds in what looks like a janitor’s closet. Mops hang from cinder block next to a slop sink. Cages line a narrow room. Birds, confined alone, frantically fly from corner to corner of the enclosures or peck at the metal, searching for an escape.
Lattin’s students enter. They put on protective gowns, cosplaying as scientists. They place food dishes containing a novel object (such as a plastic egg or cocktail umbrella) into the cages, supposedly to test the birds’ fear of new things, and film the proceedings. Birds escape at random, and students struggle to recapture them, swiping at them with nets.
The whole escapade is bereft of any semblance of science. Why? About a thousand reasons, but how about these to start?
- Cold metal cages, windowless cinder block, and fluorescent lights are frightening to birds, who flourish among trees, flowers, and sunshine.
- These birds are often caged alone, deprived of everything familiar to them.
- Lattin is purportedly measuring the birds’ reluctance to approach the food dish, but it’s unclear whether they hesitate due to the alien environment or fear of the plastic eggs and cocktail umbrellas.
This isn’t science. It’s garbage. Cruel and pointless garbage.
What We Found: The Documents
The records we received tell the story of experimenters’ workaday cruelty and wholesale indifference to the suffering endured by the birds around them, mainly by what the documents leave out.
It’s obvious that only absolutely necessary notes were made. Boxes were frequently left blank. Sections for comments are nearly always empty. Notations are sparse.
Even a note as concerning as “blood in cage” isn’t explained. How did it get there? What was done about it? Did anyone ask a question or take action? No one bothered to say.
According to the documents, most of Lattin’s victims were killed. From June 2019 to April 2021, she held more than 120 birds in her lab. Seventeen of them inexplicably died. Three died on the same day—but the records don’t shed light on why or how. At least two birds were apparently transferred to the veterinary school, presumably for classroom experiments.
Birds in Lattin’s laboratory were most often held in cages by themselves, with as many as 48 birds in a single room.
Peddling Influence, Backroom Dealings
Baton Rouge’s bird protection ordinance, which prohibited trapping or harming wild birds, became an inconvenience for Lattin since that’s how she stocked her torture chambers. After PETA complained to local authorities about her illegal bird capture in October 2019, she and the university got to work, records show.
Lattin tried to keep these records from PETA, insisting that she had retained an attorney as a private citizen and therefore wasn’t subject to our open records request.
But oops! A January 10, 2020, e-mail from attorney Michael Patterson, a founding member of Long Law Firm, to Lattin directs her to call him to “schedule a meeting … to discuss working with LSU general counsel’s office.”
It appears that a deal was cut less than a month later. In a February 5, 2020, e-mail, Patterson wrote to Lattin, “I spoke with the councilman about your situation last week. I think he will provide us with a possible legislative solution. Once I have a proposal I will send to you so we can discuss.”
The unnamed Baton Rouge council member was apparently Chandler Loupe, an LSU alum, who introduced the new ordinance that, conveniently for Lattin, removed protections for songbirds by leaving gaping loopholes for experimentation.
On February 19, 2020, apparently to ensure that the new draft ordinance met with Lattin’s approval, Patterson wrote to her, “Attached is a draft amendment to the [Baton Rouge] ordinance for your review. Let me have any comments your [sic] have.”
On March 11, 2020, Patterson told Lattin the ordinance had been passed.
Two months. That’s all it took for an elite group of well-heeled actors to make an end run around democracy and bend a law they didn’t like.
Pink Puffs of Terror
According to her protocol, which PETA obtained from a state agency, Lattin trapped 240 house and Eurasian tree sparrows during a three-year period and experimented on them to determine their level of “neophobia” (the fear of new things). She starved the birds overnight and then put an unfamiliar object—such as a colored plastic egg, pink puffs, a cocktail umbrella, or other nonsense—near or on their food dish. Experimenters measured how long it took the birds to eat.
Lattin’s cruelty can cause them to suffer from depression, severe lethargy, an inability to perch, unkempt feathers, a hunched posture, dehydration, decreased food and water intake, weight loss of more than 15%, increased respiratory depth, and open-mouth breathing, according to the documents PETA received.
Documents show that Lattin and her experimenters cut into and removed part of the skulls of some of the birds, inserting a tube into their heads through which to chemically scramble their brains before a test. After the test, they killed the birds.
In other tests, experimenters snatched 3-day-old birds from their nests and caged them. Some of the babies were purposely starved so severely that their cognitive function was affected. After a few weeks, experimenters plucked the birds’ feathers for analysis. They drew blood and restrained the birds in cloth bags for up to two hours. They also subjected them to a social dominance test in which two males were put in a cage with one food dish, forcing them to fight for food. They were tested for neophobia, then killed.
Some birds were killed through a process in which their blood was drained from their body and replaced with something else.
What You Can Do
Lattin somehow persuaded the National Science Foundation to bankroll her bunk science with more than $1 million in taxpayer funds. Please take action today and urge the foundation to stop wasting money on her cruel and pointless experiments immediately: