Protesters With Tree Trimmers to Push for Animal-Free Military Trauma Training

During World Week for Animals in Laboratories, PETA Will Rally Nationwide Support for the Switch to Superior Simulators

For Immediate Release:
April 24, 2017

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

Armed with tree branch cutters, life-size cardboard goats, and posters proclaiming, “Save Troops’ Lives: Ditch Crude Mutilation Training,” PETA members will head to military bases and recruitment centers across the country this week: World Week for Animals in Laboratories.

In Berkeley, California; Boston; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Philadelphia; and Phoenix and outside the gates of Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Camp Pendleton in San Diego, protesters will call for better training for military medical personnel and support for the bipartisan Battlefield Excellence through Superior Training (BEST) Practices Act, which, if passed, would mandate that lifesaving medical skills be taught using effective, ethical, and economic human-patient simulation technology.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—notes that service members currently shoot, stab, burn, and cut apart live pigs and goats in training drills. They also cut off live animals’ broken legs with gardening tools—an exercise that protesters outside Fort Bragg will mimic with plush goats.

“Stabbing pigs and hacking apart live goats is no way to train military personnel to treat human patients,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on the U.S. military to support our troops by replacing these archaic drills with the best training possible, and that’s human-patient simulators.”

For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.