Here is some of the hideous handiwork of April's Vivisector of the Month, Janet Neisewander of Arizona State University, who has been conducting wasteful and cruel addiction experiments on animals since 1984.

Using nearly $3 million in taxpayer money, Neisewander gets rats hooked on drugs like morphine, cocaine, and nicotine—sometimes after obliterating parts of the rats' brains with acid.

In these pictures, the rats have nicotine pumped directly into their jugular veins through tubes implanted in their heads. Later, they'll be killed and decapitated and have their brains removed.

How You Can Help Animals Killed in Nicotine Experiments

Thanks to studies in humans, we already know that smoking cigarettes can cause disease in nearly every organ of the human body. Please tell the National Institutes of Health to stop funding nicotine experiments on animals and use tax money for prevention, education, and human-based research instead.

Now that a debt-ceiling compromise has been reached in Washington, Congress faces the task of slashing more than $1 trillion in spending over the next decade. So which government-funded programs should get the ax? PETA is suggesting cutting the $16 billion spent annually on animal experiments.

A good place to start would be the cruel "Mr. Potato Head" experiments on baby monkeys conducted by Kevin Grove at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, which have cost taxpayers more than $8 million, including an additional $94,000 in support from the Obama stimulus package. This Vivisector of the Month awardee spends his days terrorizing baby monkeys with things that scare them, such as Mr. Potato Head dolls, to see if babies of monkeys fed unhealthy, high-fat diets are more scared than those of monkeys who ate healthy diets. Hello--does anyone not know by now that junk food is bad for you?

You can see the ridiculous and cruel experiments for yourself in this never-before-seen video footage that PETA has obtained from ONPRC:
 

 
PETA has written to several key members of Congress, including those charged with appointing members to the super committee that will study where to make spending cuts, to suggest that the government could save billions every year by halting funding for these and other cruel and pointless experiments.

You can help by e-mailing your senators and representatives and asking them to spend your money on something other than tormenting animals.

 
Written by Michelle Sherrow

PETA Files readers, it's your call. Who's the cruelest monster of them all? The contenders for May's Vivisector of the Month are vying hard for the title, and animals are suffering for it.

John VandeBerg is the director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas—one of the last laboratories in the world that still torments chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, in cruel and invasive experiments. VandeBerg is even urging the federal government to rip hundreds more chimpanzees out of a peaceful retirement and send them to his laboratory, where these highly intelligent and social beings will spend the rest of their lives confined to what amounts to a prison cell for infectious-disease experiments. And his callousness doesn't stop with chimpanzees: VandeBerg also torments and kills baboons and opossums to show that a diet high in fat and cholesterol is bad for you. Your tax dollars at work!  

Up against VandeBerg is Aleksey Sobakin, who definitely cannot count sheep to help him sleep at night. He and his cohorts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have spent decades placing hundreds of sheep in a decompression chamber that rapidly reduces air pressure, causing bubbles of nitrogen to form in the brain, the blood, and other organs. This extremely painful condition—commonly known as "the bends"—killed many of the sheep in clear violation of a Wisconsin cruelty-to-animals law. The sheep who didn't die during decompression were killed afterward. These hideous experiments were only stopped after PETA and Madison-based Alliance for Animals filed a formal complaint in court and a judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the apparent violations of state law.

After you make your decision, make your voice heard. Ask your congressperson to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would keep retired chimpanzees away from VandeBerg and other experimenters. And urge the special prosecutor investigating Sobakin to file charges against him and other culpable experimenters before the statute of limitations runs out.

 
Written by Michelle Sherrow

David Gozal
louisville / CC

It's time once again for my favorite PETA Files feature: our Vivisector of the Month contest. Each and every month, I read up on two of our nation's most vile vivisectors and let you, our dear readers, decide who is the worst by voting.

Let me begin by recognizing Marina Picciotto, whose primate addiction studies and mouse torture won her the undesirable title of Most Vile Vivisector last month. Her competitor was much-derided Allyson Bennett. Congrats, Marina—I'm certain Yale and all of New Haven are glad to have you!

This month, we have another two truly bizarre candidates … just see for yourself.

David Gozal of the Kosair Children's Hospital Research Institute in Louisville has a bit of a problem. He is fascinated by erections—mouse erections, to be exact. He passes his days in the lab getting up close and very personal with little boy-mice, studying their erections and even severing their spinal cords so that they cannot move while experimenters observe their penises.

In his most recent study, "Erectile Dysfunction in a Murine [Mouse] Model of Sleep Apnea," which was funded in part by the federal government, Gozal measured the number of erections and ejaculations in dozens of mice after placing them in a chamber to deprive them of oxygen. Some mice were also given tadalafil, an erectile dysfunction drug. They were then killed by puncturing their hearts with a needle, and their testicles and penises were cut out of their bodies for examination. Gozal concluded that oxygen deprivation makes it more difficult to get an erection and that tadalafil, which is already prescribed (as “Cialis”) for humans with erectile dysfunction, works in mice.

Experiments on pigs

Daniel Traber of the University of Texas Medical Branch Department of Anesthesiology has made a living for almost three decades by burning animals' skin off. In a recent experiment, he either torched mice with a Bunsen burner until more than 40 percent of their bodies was charred or forced them to inhale smoke. A few select mice got the full treatment—they were both burned and forced to inhale smoke. Some died during the experiment, and survivors were subsequently killed.

In another study, Traber heated an aluminum bar to nearly 400 degrees with a Bunsen burner and roasted the skin of live pigs on it for 30 seconds, creating a series of deep burns that covered 15 percent of their bodies. In order to repair the deliberately injured animals, Traber and colleagues then removed skin from the pigs' legs to graft over the areas that had been burned off. After living through all this torture, the pigs were killed. Again, this is only his most recent work—Traber has been burning, mutilating, and killing sheep for years.

Who should win? The Children's Hospital Vivisector or the Bunsen Burninator? As always, let me help you decide by posing a question: Would you rather be molested, stabbed in the heart, and have your genitals torn out, or would you rather be roasted alive over a Bunsen burner, forced to inhale the smell of your burning flesh, and then killed?

It's a burning question, isn't it?

Written by Sean Conner