U.S. military to phase out live tissue training
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2013
WASHINGTON D.C.—All five branches of the U.S. military were on March 3, 2013 due to send to Congress written plans to phase out live tissue training, meaning the use of deliberately mutilated animals to teach emergency livesaving techniques to combat medics.
The requirement was included in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, passed by Congress in January 2013 and signed into law by President Barack Obama. In recent years, we have convinced the Army and Navy to replace cruel training involving monkeys, cats, and ferrets in favor of human-like simulators. Now we’re close to ending the abuse of the animals most frequently and violently killed by the military, said PETA laboratory investigations director Justin Goodman.
The U.S. is one of just six of the 28 members of NATO that still uses live animals in training combat medics. About a third of the animals 963,600 a year, are goats used by the Army Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Live pigs and goats are used by the U.S. Marine Corps at Marine Corps Base Hawaii and Twenty-Nine Palms, California.
Pressure to end live tissue training intensified in 2006 as result of a New York Times article detailing the training of a combat medic, and gained further momentum after video surfaced in April 2012 of goats suffering leg amputations with a tree-trimmer as part of Coast Guard medical training in Virginia Beach.
