***

On a crisp day in November, Lattin, dressed in jeans and a dark cardigan, stepped off a shuttle onto the curb outside the Yale School of Medicine. As we walked toward her lab along the sun-dappled sidewalk, her demeanor scarcely showed the six months of harassment she had endured.

Lattin came to Yale in 2014 after receiving her doctorate from Tufts University. She came to Yale for access to world-class equipment:  PET scanners, doughnut-shaped instruments that use particles of antimatter to peer inside the organs of a still-living body. Yale has one of the best PET labs in the world, according to Richard Carson, director of the University’s PET Center and Lattin’s boss. The scanners enable researchers to quantify everything from organ function to brain density by examining how organic molecules, such as sugars or hormones, are concentrated in the various parts of the body. The scanning process is complex and expensive, not least because it requires researchers to have a stock of radioactive molecules on hand to inject into their subjects.

The School of Medicine is a fitting home for such a complex operation. Clinicians use PET scanners to find cancerous tumors; medical researchers use them to make sure new drugs hit their target. Lattin wanted to use them to study how different hormone levels in the brain influence bird behavior.

“It’s kind of amazing to me that they let me put feral sparrows in their million-dollar scanner,” she said. “Not everyone would be as open to doing this work.”

Carson said they had never scanned a bird before. About 25 percent of PET Center scans involve animals, but most of these examine more typical research subjects, such as mice or chimpanzees. Lattin had to develop new techniques to use the scanners on sparrows. She worked with engineers at Yale’s Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design to build a specialized plastic gurney for the birds that holds their bodies steady while they lay anesthetized in the scanner. And she’s had to develop a new method for injecting the radioactive tracer into the sparrows’ tiny bodies.

“Now the birds are being scanned the same way people are being scanned,” said Carson.

The research harks back to Lattin’s time before academia, when she was on staff at animal shelters and other conservation centers. Her work has already contributed to scientific discourse, racking up a total 384 citations, according to Google Scholar. Her crude oil study has been cited by researchers working with dolphins, sea turtles and other species exposed to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lattin’s study found that even tiny amounts of crude oil induced the birds’ stress response. Even if they appeared normal, the birds’ hormones revealed internal distress. In other words, stress can be hard to detect — in birds being researched or in a researcher herself.

***

In 1980, PETA began with five members and a philosophy. Since then, its numbers have grown to over 6.5 million — a million and a half more than the National Rifle Association. Inspired by Peter Singer’s manifesto of the modern animal rights movement, its founders sparked a revolution. They believe that the mistreatment of animals is morally equivalent to the mistreatment of any human group. “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment or abuse in any other way,” the PETA slogan goes.

Among the general public, PETA is perhaps best known for its provocative advertisements, which advocate for  adoption of a vegan lifestyle. Provocative puts it lightly: In a recent Thanksgiving-themed ad, a family happily slices into a roasted human child, dressed like a turkey. But PETA’s efforts at persuasion don’t stop with consumer choice. Among other watchdog agencies, PETA has a department devoted to investigating and lobbying against the use of animals in academic and commercial research.

PETA’s lab investigators first looked into Lattin’s work last year, after an article published in the Yale Engineering magazine detailed her collaboration with the CEID.

A few things stood out immediately, said  PETA’s chief of laboratory case management Alka Chandna. Lattin’s abstracts made no mention of the potential human benefit of her research. Chandna and her colleagues doubted that Lattin’s discoveries in wild sparrows could be applied to other bird species — let alone humans.

“Right away, we can say, ‘She’s harming animals and there’s no human benefit,’” Chandna said.

Ingrid Taylor, a veterinarian on staff at PETA, pored over Lattin’s articles, searching for evidence of cruelty in the experiments she conducted at Yale and Tufts. For Taylor, the worst part was that these were not accidents that occurred during the course of research — they were part of the research itself. Lattin’s crimes were premeditated.

In May 2017, PETA, evidence in hand, sprang into action. It filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the district attorney of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, where Tufts is located. (Most states, including Connecticut, exempt research animals from their cruelty laws, but Massachusetts does not.) Then, the campaign for popular opinion began.

“Right from our inception we’ve known that media is critical to our work,” said Chandna. Social media has only made it easier to amplify their message. It’s a change for Chandna, who’s been involved with animal rights work since the 1980s. It used to be that, as an undergraduate, she would spend $15 to order VHS tapes from PETA through the mail. Now, videos surface right in your news feed.

One such video begins with a photo of Lattin holding the blue plastic device that keeps the sparrows in place while they are in the scanner. She’s grinning directly into camera. “This woman is torturing songbirds,” reads the superimposed text. The video has over 2 million views on Facebook and about 9,000 “angry” reactions.

“You better believe that we’re sponsoring advertisements on Facebook,” Chandna said. “You better believe that whenever there’s an opportunity to get this video footage in front of people, we’re doing that.”

PETA has used other channels as well, sending letters to the Yale President’s Office and appealing to alumni for support. A recent alumna, Hanh Nguyen ’17, first heard about Lattin’s research when she started working for PETA the summer after graduation. She wasn’t personally involved with the campaign until October, when she joined a group of demonstrators outside a Yale Corporation meeting at Woodbridge Hall. That month, she sent a letter to alumni organizations, urging them to express their disapproval of the experiments.

***

When Lattin needs more sparrows, she gathers a mix of potter traps and mist nets and goes herself to catch them. The sparrows she finds are an invasive species, introduced to North American cities in the 1850s as a solution for urban pests and a salve for homesick European immigrants. They’ve since spread across the whole continent, which is one reason Lattin felt comfortable using them in research — she knew they weren’t going extinct anytime soon.

Lattin acquired her bird-handling skills as a young science educator at the Glen Helen Raptor Center, near Springfield, Ohio. The center is part nature preserve, part animal shelter for the area’s birds of prey. Primarily, Lattin led grade-school children on hikes and taught them about local bird populations. Toward the end of her time, she became an assistant to the veterinarian on staff. Sometimes, she said, birds would be brought in who could not be saved. While the vet euthanized them with a syringe, Lattin held their bodies still.

“That was really hard for me,” she recalled, taking a long pause. “It was pretty sad. But you know, definitely better than … starving to death is definitely a worse way to go.”

In her current research, Lattin prides herself on her ability to handle birds deftly, injecting them with radiotracer and taking blood samples. By doing things smoothly, she minimizes the stress birds otherwise would have felt from having someone reach into their cage or pull them out of a net.

Enjoying the work at raptor shelter and subsequent nature preserves, Lattin moved to Eastern Kentucky to study birds full time. To obtain her degree, she chose a topic not far from her undergraduate work in linguistics: analyzing the songs of the blue grosbeak, a seedeater common to the southern United States. Male grosbeaks sing to impress potential mates and, like human speech, their songs are made up of a complex line of syllables strung together by the singer. And like some humans, when male grosbeaks get worked up, they blow a gasket, launching into a tirade of syllables several times longer than a typical song.

Lattin wanted to capture these tunes in the wild, so she packed up her recording equipment and drove to where most humans stayed clear — a local chemical weapons depot. The 14,000 acres of uninhabited land had become a haven for wildlife, favored among local hunters, and the perfect spot to record birdsongs on a spring morning. Lattin got out of her car and started unpacking her equipment. Immediately, she noticed something was off. It was April, peak breeding season. The hills should have been alive with the sound of birdsong. Why was it so quiet?    

The answer, it turned out, was weather: A harsh late May frost had shocked the local ecosystem, halting flowers at the bud, hardening the ground and scattering the insects. Without grasshoppers to eat or seeds to chew on, there was no sense trying to attract a mate. “Of course, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do?’” recalled Lattin. “I’m trying to do this research project on song and the birds aren’t singing. But for them, it made sense.”

The frost was a stressor, a threat in the birds’ environment that influenced their behavior — like a lion on the savannah or the loss of control from captivity. While eventually grosbeaks returned to the area, the spring silence alerted Lattin to stress as a phenomenon worth studying further. And so her research began.

***

“It is amazing that they chose Christine,” Carson said. Given that a lot of animal research is done at Yale, Carson and his colleagues struggle to rationalize PETA’s unilateral focus on Lattin. “Whether that’s because they think more people will care about birds than care about mice and rats,” Carson said, “I don’t know.”

Lattin has her own theories, but mostly she feels vilified unfairly. She’d deliberately switched to PET scanning because the procedure was less invasive. In the future, she hopes to be able to release caught sparrows back into the wild with tiny transmitters so as to track and, later, recapture them. Not only would that be better for the birds, it would be better for the research.

It would feel better for Lattin too. She’s never liked killing the birds, but legally, that’s the requirement: her scientific
collector’s permit, issued by the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection, doesn’t permit her to release captured birds back into the wild. The department has an interest in reducing sparrow populations. They’re invasive, and they compete for nest space with local species like bluebirds, whose numbers have declined in recent decades. The permit isn’t something Lattin likes to talk about publicly because she fears it will sound like she isn’t taking responsibility for her work.

PETA has repeatedly argued that Lattin should stop using animals altogether and switch to modern methods, like computational modeling. This perspective misapprehends the state of alternate methods, Lattin said. It’s hard for her to think of something more modern than PET scans. And without animal research, she said, “all scientific discovery would come to a screeching halt.”