Tom Green County District Court Judge Barbara L. Walther ruled Thursday, July 11, 2024, that Angelo State University must release public records relating to an experiment conducted on dozens of mice that resulted in the animals' unnecessary suffering and death, reportedly to study the impact of the foster care system on human children. The ruling overturns Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Nov.
17, 2022 decision to side with the university in denying the records. On July 13, 2023, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington, D.C.
based health advocacy group of more than 17,000 doctor members that encourages higher standards in research, filed a lawsuit seeking information on the "foster care study." In the "foster care study," experimenters used mice in an attempt to mimic the effects of multiple foster placements on children within the foster care system. Baby mice were removed from their biological mothers at different intervals.
Researchers tested the mice for "anxiety-like" behavior, killed them, and weighed their brains. Researchers concluded that mice who lived in one foster home, as opposed to two, were more "resilient." Stephen Farghali, a research advocacy coordinator with the Physicians Committee, wrote in a Nov.
3, 2022, complaint to the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, "Is killing 81 animals necessary to 'prove' that human children are better off not bouncing between multiple foster homes? Killing animals doesn't make it scienc.