PETA Demands Renewed Animal Test Ban Amid Army’s ‘Havana Syndrome’ Probe

For Immediate Release:
March 13, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA is calling for a renewed ban on weapon-wounding experiments on animals in a letter today to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth amid reports that the Army is conducting and planning cruel radio frequency radiation tests on animals in order to study Havana syndrome, even though five U.S. intelligence agencies found no link between such directed energy weapons and the disease.

The Army had banned the use of weapons to wound animals for medical research, development, testing, or evaluation, but the decision was quietly reversed in 2020.

But now, an ongoing, $750,000 taxpayer-funded brain injury experiment blasts ferrets with radio waves for hours daily, and there is a reported plan to expose monkeys to pulsed microwave radiation.

“The intelligence community has rejected the idea that directed energy weapons are behind Havana syndrome, yet the Army is bombarding animals with radiation anyway,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on Secretary Austin and Secretary Wormuth to end these gruesome experiments and reinstate the ban on all weapon-wounding tests on animals.”

PETA supporters are putting pressure on the military to enact a ban, and PETA also urges the Army to respond to its September appeal for public disclosure of at least one confirmed classified protocol for weapon-wounding testing on dogs, cats, monkeys, or marine animals.

These efforts cap decades of PETA campaigns against weapon-wounding tests on animals. In 1983, PETA exposed and successfully campaigned to shut down a U.S. Department of Defense laboratory in which dogs, goats, and other animals were shot with high-powered weapons, resulting in the first-ever permanent ban on the shooting of dogs and cats in wound labs. In 2005, 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.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.