Rock icon Iggy Pop has sent a letter on PETA's behalf to Yale University President Peter Salovey calling on him to end experimenter Christine Lattin’s chronic-stress experiments on wild songbirds, which Pop — the guardian of a bird named Biggy Pop — calls “wasteful, useless, and unspeakably cruel.”
“As a person who admires birds, I was sickened to learn from PETA that a Yale experimenter, Christine Lattin, is trapping wild birds to experiment on in absolutely hideous ways,” he wrote. "This experimenter takes sparrows and other birds from nature and injects them with chemicals to destroy their adrenal glands. She has then intentionally caused them stress through a variety of torments, including yelling at them, playing loud music, rattling their cages every two minutes, rolling the cages back and forth so swiftly that they can’t perch, and restraining them in cloth bags for 30 minutes at a time, all petrifying experiences for them.
“To top it off, after weeks and sometimes months of this abuse, the birds are then snuffed out, killed, as if their lives meant nothing.
“These experiments are wasteful, useless, and unspeakably cruel. Birds have great intelligence and social needs that are as important to them as our own are to us.
“Thank you for your consideration of this important matter. Please let me hear that Yale University will immediately act to stop these unethical experiments.”
