Judge: Texas university must release records on research study that resulted in deaths of dozens of animals

Tom Green County District Court Judge Barbara L. Walther ruled Thursday, July 11, 2024, that Angelo State University must release public records relating to an experiment conducted on dozens of mice that resulted in the animals' unnecessary suffering and death, reportedly to study the impact of the foster care system on human children.

The ruling overturns Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Nov. 17, 2022 decision to side with the university in denying the records.

On July 13, 2023, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington, D.C. based health advocacy group of more than 17,000 doctor members that encourages higher standards in research, filed a lawsuit seeking information on the "foster care study."

In the "foster care study," experimenters used mice in an attempt to mimic the effects of multiple foster placements on children within the foster care system. Baby mice were removed from their biological mothers at different intervals. Researchers tested the mice for "anxiety-like" behavior, killed them, and weighed their brains. Researchers concluded that mice who lived in one foster home, as opposed to two, were more "resilient."

Stephen Farghali, a research advocacy coordinator with the Physicians Committee, wrote in a Nov. 3, 2022, complaint to the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, "Is killing 81 animals necessary to 'prove' that human children are better off not bouncing between multiple foster homes? Killing animals doesn't make it science. We think the public deserves to know how little these researchers value the lives of their animal research subjects."

The Physicians Committee filed a Texas Public Information Act request on Sept. 14, 2022, for Angelo State's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) protocols and annual reports related to the "foster care study" to learn how the animals were used and treated.

The university denied the Physicians Committee's records request claiming that IACUCs are medical committees and their records are therefore exempt from disclosure under public records law.

In her ruling, Judge Walther wrote Angelo State's IACUC does not meet the legal definition of a medical committee, which is a committee of a medical school or health science center. "…[T]he information requested by Petitioner should be released and is not protected information," she wrote.

Deborah Press, associate general counsel with the Physicians Committee, said "This ruling shows that animal experimenters in Texas cannot invent loopholes to hide the indefensible things they're doing to animals."

Provided by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine