UCHSC/Creative Commons

We’ve talked about Moshe Solomonow a bit before. He was a candidate for Vivisector of the Week a few weeks ago (he lost, in a last-second upset, to a deceased monkey butcher named Thomas Langfitt), and his other accomplishments include performing invasive back surgery on cats without, apparently, using proper anaesthetics … for the past fifteen years. Well, if you’ve checked out the main feature on the PETA website in the past couple of days, you’ll know that the latest on Moshe and his pals at the UC Denver and Health Sciences Center is an entire litany of complaints from a whistleblower about shoddy animal welfare practices, neglect, and outright cruelty in their labs. Here are some of the things these folks have allegedly been up to over the past few years:

• Failing to provide veterinary care or euthanasia in emergencies
• Failing to properly train animal care employees
• Improperly reviewing experimental procedures
• Skimping on anaesthesia during painful surgeries
• Leaving a monkey with a prolapsed colon to suffer for hours
• Killing a conscious rabbit with a heart puncture

And the list goes on—to the tune of a 30-page complaint that we just submitted to the NIH, gently suggesting that they have a look into the way these people are spending their money.

Rabbit with skin lesions

If you’d like to write to University of Colorado’s president about his labs, you can do so through the form on this page. We’re asking them to dismiss their Animal Care and Use Committee (these folks were supposed to be checking up to make sure there weren’t any violations in the animal labs—I guess they spent their time playing minesweeper instead, or maybe keeping up with Us Weekly), and to ban ol’ Moshe from ever using animals in research again.

It's that time again, folks, where we pick out one researcher from a pool of the most cold-hearted animal abusers in the business who has distinguished himself over his colleagues with an unswerving dedication to senseless cruelty and bad science. The voter turnout for last week was abysmal, since most commenters were so disgusted that they couldn't choose between the two candidates, but the show must go on—and last week's winner (by a hair) was UConn's David Waitzman, who got a last-minute boost in the voting after his sick practices were outed on the front page of his own University's newspaper.

Now it's time to reach for those barf bags and hit the ballots, because we've got a tight head-to-head battle this week between a cat-torturer and a man who has killed almost every kind of animal in his 30-year career. Drum roll, please …

Moshe Solomonow, UC Denver.

UCHSC/Creative Commons

Moshe's medium is cats, and his experiment of choice involves cutting open their backs down to their spinal cords in order to attach "S" hooks to their spinal ligaments. A whistleblower at the university recently contacted PETA to inform us that the drug the cats were being given as an anesthetic for these barbaric experiments did not appear to be effective and that the cats were still moving and struggling after the drug was administered. You can learn more about Moshe's lengthy career working with house cats here.

Thomas Langfitt, UPenn (deceased).

collphyphil/Creative Commons

When the Philadelphia College of Physicians announced their decision to endow a chair in honor of the notorious Thomas Langfitt this year, animal lovers everywhere were horrified. Mr. Langfitt spent three decades "studying" trauma by smashing the heads and bodies of live dogs, pigs, monkeys, and other animals, and ultimately had his funding cut off when he repeatedly delivered crippling blows to the heads of baboons at UPenn, following PETA's release of video footage taken by the experimenters themselves, in which they ridiculed the primates and appeared to take pleasure in inflicting pain on them. You can read our letter to the group here. Langfitt is dead now. Let's make sure his legacy dies with him.

That's all for now. Don't forget to vote, and stay tuned next week,* when we'll be talking about some folks who really don't like mice.

*The PETA Files cannot guarantee that they will remember to do this next week.

I got an e-mail from Ingrid on Monday, asking me to please remember not to fall into the "animals everyone likes" trap—e.g., talking up a storm about loveable animals like chimps and kittens, but not giving equal time to animals like hens, sheep, fish, or rats, who suffer horribly in farms and laboratories but don’t always get the compassion they deserve, because they’re not quite so cuddly. As usual, Ingrid’s point is right on the money, but it’s also true, I think, that many people come to the understanding that no animal should be exploited (however small or odd-looking they are) only after asking themselves how they would feel if their own dog or cat was abused in that way.

Which brings me to the horrible news we just received from the University of Colorado. According to a whistleblower at the university, cats who were being used in hideous experiments conducted by an individual named Moshe Solomonow, were not being anaesthetized properly—and video footage obtained by PETA shows the animals writhing and vomiting after being injected with a drug called chloralose. For years, Solomonow has cut cats open and messed around with their spinal columns, saying that his study is somehow related to lower back disorders in humans. All the cats are killed at the end of the experiments. The video is tough to get through, and it makes me think of my own cat and how awful it would be if these torturers got their hands on her, but I hope that people who watch it will make the connection that this kind of callous disregard for suffering is unacceptable regardless of whether the victim’s a cat, a pig, a rat, or a human. Please click here to write to the University of Colorado and ask them to stop it.