A judge awarded roughly $434,000 in legal fees Friday to an animal rights group engaged in a yearslong legal battle with Oregon Health & Science University over the school’s research into the effect of alcohol on prairie voles.
The case began in late 2017, when OSHU researcher Andrey Ryabinin published a journal article finding that alcohol weakened the partner bond between male and female voles but had little effect on aggression among male voles.
In 2020, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals filed a lawsuit accusing OHSU of failing to provide videos of the experiments, which were funded by almost $2 million in federal grants, in response to public records requests.
The university initially said the videos had been destroyed by researchers, but PETA’s forensic examiner eventually discovered they were still accessible on a lab computer’s file directory, court records show.
Multnomah County Circuit Judge Andrew Lavin ruled last October that OHSU engaged in an “unreasonable” delay in disclosing the records. Now Lavin has determined OHSU must foot the bill for most of PETA’s legal fees.
“This ruling is a major victory for public transparency,” Asher Smith, an attorney for PETA, said in an interview. “Taxpayers fund these experiments and taxpayers have a right to know what these experiments actually looked like.”
OHSU has appealed Lavin’s earlier ruling and Smith said the attorney fees will be held in escrow while a higher court reviews the case.
The PETA attorney said the “drunken voles” research lacks scientific value and that the effect of alcohol on fidelity has already been extensively studied among willing human subjects. The voles were dissected at the end of the experiment, he added.
OHSU, for its part, said it is committed to treating animals humanely and with respect when conducting biomedical research.
“OHSU acknowledges and regrets the delay in disclosure,” the university said in an unsigned statement. “We have a comprehensive process in place for complying with our obligations under Oregon Public Records Law, and we are continually reviewing that process to identify opportunities for improvement.”
This isn’t the first time OHSU has ended up under the microscope for conducting research on animals.
Five prairie voles died in 2020 after lab workers failed to slake their thirst, The Oregonian/OregonLive previously reported, and two rhesus monkeys at OHSU’s primate center also died that year after a technician moved their cages into a washing apparatus without realizing they were locked inside.
