Oliver Stone Says, ‘End the War on Animals’

Legendarily bold film director Oliver Stone is no stranger to the horrors of the battlefield, both as an Army combat veteran of Vietnam and from depictions of that war in his films Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Heaven & Earth. Now Stone is shining a light on another disturbing side of U.S. military operations by narrating PETA’s video exposé.

Leaked video footage shows a recent Coast Guard trauma training drill in which instructors are seen breaking and cutting off the limbs of live goats with tree trimmers, stabbing the animals, and pulling out their internal organs. The goats moan and kick during the mutilations—signs that they had not received adequate anesthesia. One instructor is heard cheerfully whistling as he cuts off goats’ legs and a Coast Guard participant callously jokes about writing songs about mutilating the animals. Following official complaints from PETA about this disturbing video footage, which showed Tier 1 Group instructors failing to provide adequate anesthesia to goats who were stabbed and cut into, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited and issued an official warning to Tier 1 Group for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act.

Military regulations require that animal laboratories be replaced with humane non-animal methods whenever possible, and some military facilities have already replaced the archaic and violent use of animals for this training—which costs 10,000 animals their lives each year—with more modern and effective human-patient simulators and other non-animal methods. A recent study by PETA and military medical experts also revealed that 22 of 28 NATO nations use only non-animal methods for military training.

The evidence of the superiority of these state-of-the-art simulation methods for military trauma training is so overwhelming that following discussions with PETA, both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Coast Guard announced policies substantially scaling back their use of animals and requiring that more personnel now be trained exclusively with advanced simulators and other non-animal methods.

Please join Oliver Stone and PETA now by calling on the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to do right by both animals and military personnel by replacing animal-based trauma training with superior, 21st century non-animal methods.