250 Veterans Join PETA in Calling On U.S. Army to End Weapon-Wounding Tests on Animals

For Immediate Release:
November 11, 2024

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In a letter sent today, more than 250 former U.S. Army service members marked Veterans Day by joining PETA to urge Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth to reinstate a ban on cruel and unreliable experiments that involve wounding dogs, cats, marine mammals, primates, and other animals with weapons. In 2020, the Army quietly reversed its previous ban on this practice.

The grotesque tests are completely useless to humans because of significant physiological differences between species, the letter states.

“Using animals as cannon fodder is a retreat to an archaic policy,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is urging Secretary Wormuth to heed the calls of hundreds of former service members this Veterans Day by ending these abhorrent weapon-wounding experiments on all animals in favor of superior, human-relevant research methods.”

In 1983, PETA exposed and successfully campaigned to shut down a U.S. Department of Defense “wound lab” in which dogs, goats, and other animals were shot with weapons, resulting in the first-ever permanent ban on the shooting of dogs and cats in wound labs. The ban was bolstered in 2005, when the Army issued Regulation 40-33, which prohibited the use of dogs, cats, nonhuman primates, and marine mammals in “[r]esearch conducted for development of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.”

But in 2020, the Army issued Policy 84, which overturned decades of precedent by permitting the use of these animals “to inflict wounds upon using a weapon.”

In contrast, the 59th Medical Wing of the U.S. Air Force adopted a policy in 2022 stating that its program “does not conduct Research & Development or training protocols involving non-human primates, dogs, cats, or marine mammals.”

Last year, following pressure from PETA, the U.S. Army ended a cruel weapon-wounding experiment on ferrets conducted at Wayne State University more than six months ahead of schedule. The test involved bombarding 48 ferrets with radio waves to induce brain injuries in a purported attempt to study whether a directed energy weapon could induce the effects of Havana syndrome in humans—a link that has been widely debunked by the intelligence community.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.