Texas A&M hid Facebook posts discussing animal abuse, settles lawsuit

In 2016, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched a campaign to stop Texas A&M University (TAMU) from breeding dogs predisposed to Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a genetic disorder that affects human boys starting at age 4, according to Courthouse News. In May 2018, PETA sued the university for creating Facebook filters that hid comments containing words such as “dog,” “abuse,” and “testing.” In February 2020, after years of pressure from PETA, Texas A&M settled the lawsuit for $75,000, but denied any wrongdoing. 

Key Players

Texas A&M University is a public university of more than 68,000 students in College Station, Texas. Since 2012, its Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, led by professor Joe Kornegay, has bred and conducted medical testing on golden retrievers in an attempt to discover the cure for DMD in humans, as a similar version of the disease naturally occurs in the dogs. 

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is a U.S. animal rights nonprofit founded in 1980 that focuses on animal testing, factory farming, fur farming, and the use of animals in entertainment. The organization often makes headlines for its controversial tactics, such as provocative advertisements and protests against celebrities and companies.

Further Details

TAMU’s DMD research remained largely under the radar for years, but in 2016,  after learning about it from a whistleblower, PETA launched a campaign against the university’s dog colony, calling the research “cruel” and saying the dogs were “bred to suffer,” Courthouse News reported. This campaign included posting video footage of the lab alleging the dogs were being tortured and helping two students start a Change.org petition that received over a million signatures. 

Several celebrities also put pressure on TAMU to reform its research practices, including musician Paul McCartney, who, after seeing PETA’s video of the lab, wrote a letter to TAMU University President Michael Young urging him to end the “suffering of dogs in TAMU’s muscular dystrophy laboratory” and instead employ “modern research methods,” according to News 4 San Antonio. 

The university said the video was posted without appropriate context and disputed allegations of torture, the Dallas Morning News reported. TAMU also wrote in a press release that the research is “highly regulated” and subject to “rigorous oversight by multiple organizations.” It also provided other information on the testing and the dogs’ care to make the lab’s DMD research more transparent. A spokesperson for the university erroneously denied that the program was breeding dogs for its research, which the administration later corrected, saying the school was not intentionally trying to be dishonest, according to the Morning News.

In December 2017, a year after commencing this campaign, PETA staffers discovered filters placed on the university’s Facebook page when it was unable to post the comment “Shut the cruel Muscular Dystrophy dog lab down NOW! This is torture!” In subsequent efforts, the organization found that any comment containing the words “PETA,” “cruel,” “abuse,” “torture,” “MD,” “shut,” “close,” “stop,” “lab,” “testing,” or “tests” would be blocked from appearing on the page, Courthouse News reported. 

In May 2018, PETA filed a federal complaint against Texas A&M in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, arguing that the university’s censorship and filtering of comments infringed on social media users’ right to Free Speech. 

Outcome 

Texas A&M settles lawsuit, denies wrongdoing

Arrived at nearly two years after PETA brought the lawsuit against TAMU, a settlement stipulated that the university would pay $75,000 in legal fees to PETA’s counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and remove Facebook settings that violated Facebook users’ Free Speech. University spokesperson Amy Smith said, “We believe that we have found a way to move forward to end this litigation that demonstrates our university’s strong commitment to the First Amendment.”

Although PETA posted on its website that it considers the settlement a “win for free speech,” TAMU denied any wrongdoing and retained the right to “moderate Facebook comments for relevancy.”

TAMU ends dog breeding program

On Sept. 12, 2019 — after “two and a half years of unrelenting pressure from PETA and hundreds of thousands of activists” — PETA issued a press release saying the university’s MD lab would permanently shut down its dog-breeding program. 

TAMU cited Kornegay’s retirement, as well as the expiration of many grants supporting his work, as the reasons for skating down the operation. The university will now acquire dogs from other research partners rather than breeding them onsite, according to the Morning News. 

PETA said on its website that it will “keep the pressure on until the dogs who still remain in the university’s lab are released into good homes.”