Sam Douglas/ Fourth Estate
Organization sends follow-up request for documents related to animal experimentation incident in November 2022
BY SAM DOUGLAS, STAFF WRITER
On Nov. 1, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation (PETA), sent a record request letter to Mason leadership. PETA demanded Mason deliver documents that PETA requested in February regarding animal experimentation and research on campus.
“If PETA does not receive the responsive records by November 15, 2024, it will be compelled to pursue its legal remedies under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act,” said the letter, written by PETA’s Chief Legal Officer and Mason alum Jeffrey Kerr.
On Feb. 21, the organization sent a public record request for information including veterinary records, incident reports and photographs. The request was related to a November 2022 incident where expired antibiotics were “suggested” to have been used in surgeries on animals. Kerr explained that they learned of this incident through publicly available documents from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Despite this, a representative from the NIH Office of Extramural Research said that “NIH generally does not publicly post self-reported cases of noncompliance… and NIH discusses such cases only with the people and institutions involved.”
After being told that the FOIA request would cost $700, PETA sent a check on March 12; however, they didn’t hear back from the university until Sept. 23– more than six months later.
The Virginia Freedom of Information Act states that if a FOIA request is not responded to within five days, that public body “shall have an additional seven work days,” to complete the request. If the public body does not complete the request within 12 days, a reason must be given to the requester. The public body can further “petition the appropriate court for additional time” but this is only applicable to “an extraordinary volume of records”, a large search time, or if the search prevents the public body from “meeting its operational responsibilities.” This is reflected on Mason’s FOIA Requests page under “Mason’s Responsibilities in Responding to Your Request.”
“We had a breakdown on communication internally,” GMU Vice President and Chief Brand Officer Paul Allvin said. “We screwed this one up.”
According to Allvin, there was a disconnect between PETA’s check coming in and the university’s FOIA officer at the time, Susan Harris. Harris hadn’t been alerted to the check coming in, leading to the request going into the university’s “paused” queue.
“That’s ridiculous… just reprehensible,” Kerr said. “The university delay undermines the very purpose of the Virginia FOIA Act.”
Allvin attributed the further delay to redacting private document information in accordance with Virginia’s privacy laws and said that the incident caused the office to change the way that they are notified when payment comes in. “We wish this hadn’t happened,” Allvin said.
PETA received a batch of 58 PDF documents from the university on the morning of Nov. 5. Despite this, Kerr was still not pleased.
“It’s the legally required outcome. It’s not a good outcome to suggest that the university failed in its legal obligations for eight months. A good outcome for PETA would be for GMU to stop doing useless experiments on animals,” Kerr said.
