PETA to DOJ: Congress Stopped Funding Mutilation of Animals—Now Ban This Training

For Immediate Release:
January 4, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. Today, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland urging him to ban archaic trauma training drills on animals. This step follows President Joe Biden’s recent signing of the 2023 Omnibus Appropriations bill, which includes language blocking the funding of the U.S. Department of Justice’s gruesome training drills on animals unless Garland issues a “determination that such training is medically necessary and cannot be replicated by alternatives.”

Now that Congress has at least partially cut off the spigot of taxpayers’ money used by the U.S. Department of Justice to pay for horrific trauma training—which typically involves shooting, stabbing, and dismembering live pigs or goats in attempts to recreate human injuries in order to practice trauma management—it’s high time for the agency to formally ban these barbaric drills. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland need look no further for precedent than the U.S. Coast Guard, which officially ended this self-proclaimed “abhorrent” practice in 2017, following a PETA campaign. Let the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service spend their time protecting the homeland, not maiming animals in crude and useless exercises.

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