Experiments on Birds Are Bad Science

Experimenters at Colorado State University are using our tax dollars to trap American crows, American robins, and house sparrows; infect them with West Nile virus; watch as they develop symptoms of the infection; subject them to multiple blood draws; and kill them. Thirteen years of these cruel West Nile virus tests have failed to develop a cure, a vaccine, or any clinical treatments for the disease—either for birds or for humans.



In experiments performed at Yale University, highly social songbirds were caught and locked inside barren cages all alone. They were restrained in cloth bags for 30 minutes at a time to induce acute stress, given painful injections, and further stressed when forced to undergo anesthesia, which involved additional restraint and injections. Wild animals, who aren’t used to being handled, are particularly sensitive to the distressing and disorienting effects of anesthesia. Eventually, the birds were killed. Not only are these experiments extremely cruel, they’re also wasteful, because important physiological differences among species make the results inapplicable to humans or even other birds.