Military Testing: The Unseen War

News reports tally the casualties of war, and monuments are erected to honor soldiers, but the nonhuman victims of war—the animals who are shot, burned, poisoned, and tortured in military experiments—are never recognized, nor is their suffering well known.

Top Secret
Military testing is classified as “top secret,” and information about it is typically kept away from the public. Published experiments reveal that armed forces across the U.S. test all manner of weaponry on animals, from Soviet AK-47 rifles to biological and chemical warfare agents to nuclear blasts. Military experiments can be painful, repetitive, costly, and unreliable. They are particularly wasteful because most of the effects that they study can be—or have already been—observed in humans and because many of the results cannot be extrapolated to humans.

Wasted Money, Wasted Lives
Each year, hundreds of thousands of primates, dogs, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, cats, and other animals are hurt and killed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in experiments that rank among the most painful conducted in this country, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to taxpayers.(1)

The following is a sample of the wide variety of torturous, unnecessary tests that are conducted on animals:

• The military funded a radiation-sickness experiment in which monkeys were given near-lethal radiation doses; over the course of 21 days, some animals were given a drug to relieve the symptoms, while the “control group” had to suffer debilitating sickness.(2)
• At Walter Reed Army Institute, rats were forced to breathe high concentrations of carbon monoxide—which is already known to cause severe health problems and death in humans—until they died, simply because “manifestations of a brief exposure to elevated levels of CO have not been fully described.”(3)
• Anesthetized pigs at Lackland Air Force Base had their throats cut and were bled to the point of shock; after 45 minutes with dangerously low blood pressure, researchers attempted to resuscitate the pigs. Those who survived the initial experiment were killed within five days in order to study the effects of shock treatment on their organs and blood.(4)
• An Army experiment subjected rats to a similar experiment, except that they were unanesthetized (meaning that they were fully awake and that painkillers were not administered) and allowed to bleed for more than 15 minutes before they were resuscitated. Then they either died or were killed within 24 hours.(5)
• In the name of “risk assessment,” researchers at Aberdeen Proving Ground forced bobwhite quail to swallow chemical compounds that are regularly found in military munitions. Birds exposed to the highest doses suffered severe illness before dying.(6)

Other forms of military experiments include subjecting animals to decompression sickness, exposure to jet fuel, weightlessness, drugs and alcohol, smoke inhalation, and pure-oxygen inhalation. Tests are even conducted on insects and snakes in an effort to learn how to mimic their sensory perception abilities and apply them toward weapon detection.

Animals on the Battlefield
Animals have been thrown onto human battlefields for centuries. The U.S. military most commonly uses dogs; about 1,450 canines are reportedly “deployed wherever there are U.S. military troops,” according to Master Sgt. Joseph Lawson at Lackland Air Force Base.(7,8) 

Both dolphins and sea lions have been used as “lookouts” and for mine retrieval.(9) At least a dozen dolphins are known to have died since 1965 in accidents or from illness while they were being used by the military.(10)

Chickens were used in Kuwait as early detectors for chemical and biological weapons; in one instance, 43 birds died not in the “line of duty” but because they overheated in the desert sun.(11) The U.S. Marine Corps prefers to use pigeons as an involuntary “early-warning system.”(12)

Rats have been forced into mine detection; according to one trainer, “During the week, the rats are only fed when they find a mine.”(13) Researchers have also implanted electrodes in rats’ brains in order to create “remote-control rodents.”(14)

Wound Labs
The DoD has studied the effects of ballistics on live tissue (so-called “wound labs”) since the 1950s as a method of training medics and soldiers in how to treat traumatic injuries. During surgical-training sessions, conscious or semiconscious animals are suspended from slings and shot with high-powered weapons to inflict injuries that are intended to be similar to those sustained during battle. Although Congress limited the use of dogs and cats in these training exercises in the 1980s, the military continues to shoot, burn, mutilate, poison, and kill thousands of goats, pigs, and monkeys in similar exercises every year.

In one experiment, a Navy corpsman told The New York Times that instructors “shot [a pig] twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.”(15) In 2008, the San Antonio Express-News described a trauma course in which the legs of 990 living goats were broken and then amputated with a scissor-like tree-trimming tool.(16) 

Internal military documents legally obtained by PETA show that monkeys were exposed to chemical-weapon nerve agents, after which an Army medic compared a monkey’s apparently agonized reaction during the exercise to “a chiwawa [sic] shitting razor blades.”(17)  

Other Victims
The Navy’s testing of sonar systems has been linked to marine mammal beaching and deaths. Thirty dolphins died in South Florida and 39 whales perished in North Carolina following separate sonar tests in 2005.(18) The arrival of 200 melon-headed whales into dangerously shallow Hawaiian waters coincided with a U.S.-Japanese training exercise in 2004.(19) The sonar is believed to disrupt marine mammal communication and navigation systems. When they are confused, the animals surface too quickly, which may cause rapid decompression and a sickness similar to “the bends” in humans. A British study of marine mammal stranding on the coast of the U.K. found nitrogen bubbles in the animals’ livers and kidneys, an indication of decompression illness.(20)

The Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act have come under attack by the military, which has lobbied to amend the language in the laws because, according to one trade magazine, “[E]nvironmental regulations are interfering with combat training.” Officials have asked that they not be required to designate “critical habitats” for wildlife on military lands and that terms such as “annoyance” and “potential to disturb” be dropped from the Marine Mammal Protection Act.(21) 

What You Can Do
Ask your congressional representatives to urge the Department of Defense to implement alternatives to animal experiments. See our factsheet on alternatives to animal testing, and visit StopAnimalTests.com for more information.

Learn how you can help PETA end the military’s trauma- and chemical casualty–training exercises on live animals.

Please contact President Barack H. Obama and request an immediate end to U.S. military experiments on animals:

The Honorable Barack H. Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC 20515

References

1) U.S. Department of Defense, The Department of Defense Animal Care and Use Programs Fiscal Year 2002-2003.
2) John Mintz, “Radiation Sickness Drug Developed; Military Health Officials Hope Medicine Could Protect First Responders,” The Washington Post 19 May 2003.
3) Z. Gu et al., “Consequences of Brief Exposure to High Concentrations of Carbon Monoxide in Conscious Rats,” Inhalation Toxicology 17 (2005): 755-64.
4) C.M. Fitzpatrick et al., “Prolonged Low-Volume Resuscitation With HBOC-201 in a Large-Animal Survival Model of Controlled Hemorrhage,” Journal of Trauma 59 (2005): 281-3.
5) M.T. Handrigan, “Choice of Fluid Influences Outcome in Prolonged Hypotensive Resuscitation After Hemorrhage in Awake Rats,” Shock 23 (2004): 337-43.
6) M.S. Johnson et al., “Influence of Oral 2,4-Dinitrotoluene Exposure to the Northern Bobwhite (Colinus Virginianus),” International Journal of Toxicology 24 (2005): 265-74.
7) Alex Cukan, “Animal Tales: Military Dogs,” United Press International, 4 Apr. 2003.
8) Anna Gorman, “The Navy’s Underwater Allies; Trained Dolphins Are Detecting Mines in Iraqi Shipping Lanes, Clearing the Way for Humanitarian Aid. It’s a Game to Them,” Los Angeles Times 16 Apr. 2003.
9) David Hasemyer, “Stealthy Sea Lions Enlisted for Persian Gulf Guard Duty; Navy Tests Mammals as Sentinels for Ships and Shore Operations,” The San Diego Union-Tribune 18 Feb. 2003.
10) Chuck Squatriglia, “Dolphins Hunt for Mines in Gulf Waters,” San Francisco Chronicle 27 Mar. 2003.
11) Beth Daley, “Recruits Mine-Sweeping Dolphins and Bomb-Sniffing Bees Are Among the Latest to Be Drafted Into Military Service,” The Boston Globe 1 Apr. 2003.
12) Theresa Vargas, “The Dogs (and Other Animals) of War,” Newsday 29 Mar. 2003.
13) Jeff Koinange, “Live From CNN,” 6 Jul. 2004.
14) Steve Mollman, “Of Bees, Rats, and Dwarf Goats,” Wired 14 Jun. 2002.
15) C.J. Chivers, “Tending a Fallen Marine, With Skill, Prayer and Fury,” The New York Times 2 Nov. 2006.
16) Sig Christenson, “Goats Die So GIs Have a Chance at Living,” San Antonio Express-News 3 Aug. 2008.
17) Please contact PETA for a copy of the Laboratory Exercise Worksheet.
18) Richard Sadler and Geoffrey Lean, “Hi-Tech Military Sonar Sytems ‘Are Killing Britain’s Whales and Dolphins,’” Independent on Sunday 19 Jun. 2005.
19) “Sonar to Blame for Beached Whales, Report Says,” Reuters, 23 Jul. 2004.
20) Sadler and Lean.
21) Harold Kennedy, “Military Training Gets Break From Environmental Rules,” National Defense Aug. 2003.