BATON ROUGE — After winning a yearslong open records battle with LSU, an animal rights group reviewed nearly 650 hours of video compiled by a bird researcher and says her work is abusive toward sparrows and contributes little toward medical advances for humans.

The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has criticized Christine Lattin's work since at least 2017, when she was at Yale. She joined LSU in 2018 and continued to examine whether the birds hold clues to how people respond to stresses like hunger, bad weather and predators.

According to the university, her work has value. Toward the end of the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, she showed that hormone production during stress is initially beneficial, but too much too quickly can become detrimental.

But PETA calls Lattin the "lady-bird tormentor of LSU."

"She would trap the birds, bring them to her laboratory, torment them, purposefully induce stress in them and then kill them and examine their brains," PETA Laboratory Oversight and Special Cases Vice-President Alka Chandna said Thursday.

LSU said Thursday that no one was able to talk about Lattin's work. The researcher told The Advocate in 2021 that PETA didn't understand her work and that it targeted her as a means to solicit donations.

PETA began seeking public records related to Lattin's work in 2019 and eventually sued after LSU rebuffed it. For a time, LSU said that since some of the documents sought were governed by federal law, the Louisiana open records laws weren't applicable. The state Supreme Court ruled otherwise last year, saying that because LSU funds were being used, PETA had a right to the material.

"The Public Records Law must be construed expansively in favor of free and unrestricted access to public documents," the majority wrote.

However, instead of giving the material directly to PETA, Lattin posted 647 hours of videos to her lab's website. She said she was doing so "in the spirit of transparency" despite the drawn-out court fight.

PETA said its review of Lattin's material show the lab didn't adequately document veterinary care for the birds or death records. Some videos show pipe cleaners or cocktail umbrellas inside food dishes. PETA says other videos show male birds competing for food in a cage with just one dish.

"The problem is that the way she induces stress is totally unnatural and doesn't model what happens in the natural world," Chandna said.