News Reports Reveal That Military Is Blowing Up Humvees With Pigs Strapped Inside
 
For Immediate Release: 
April 8, 2009
 
Contact:
Shalin Gala 757-622-7382, 

Washington -- This morning, PETA fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates urging him to order the Department of Defense (DoD) to replace the use of pigs and rats in traumatic brain injury experiments with existing, reliable, non-animal methods. PETA's request comes on the heels of an April 7 article in USA Today, which reported that the military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is dressing live pigs in body armor and strapping them inside Humvees before blowing the vehicles up, reportedly to test the armor's effectiveness. In its letter, PETA points to a military trauma treatment that tested successfully on pigs but failed on the battlefield, costing soldiers their lives. PETA also notes that several military trauma-training agencies use only modern, non-animal test methods. For instance, the Naval Research Laboratory uses computerized human mannequins to conduct traumatic brain injury tests.
 
PETA has posted an action alert on its popular Web site asking visitors to contact DARPA to urge officials to replace the use of live animals with proven, advanced non-animal methods.
 
"The military can't even afford to provide all troops with body armor," says PETA Director of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. "Blowing up animals to study human trauma is a terrible waste of lives and money because the results aren't even relevant to humans."
 
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
 
PETA's letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates follows.

April 8, 2009
 
The Honorable Robert Gates
Secretary of Defense
 
Dear Mr. Secretary:
 
I am writing on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and our more than 2 million members and supporters to insist that the Department of Defense (DoD) end all trauma experiments and medical training exercises on live animals and instead use available non-animal methods.
 
On April 7, USA Today reported, "Military researchers have dressed live pigs in body armor and strapped them into Humvee simulators that were then blown up with explosives to study the link between roadside bomb blasts and brain injury ....The next round of the testing is scheduled for later this year." Further, concerned medics in the military have contacted PETA about cruel trauma and chemical-casualty training exercises in which live pigs are shot, stabbed, and burned; live goats' limbs are broken with bolt cutters and then cut off with garden shears; and live monkeys are poisoned with harmful chemicals.
 
As you must know, the DoD's animal experiments have failed soldiers miserably. Previous DoD experiments on a treatment for severe blood hemorrhaging using QuikClot found a 100 percent survival rate in pigs, but the treatment was completely ineffective in the field and resulted in tragic deaths of our brave soldiers, as noted in a field report issued by the Marine Corps Systems Command Liaison Team in Central Iraq.  
 
Our request to replace the DoD's use of animals in trauma experiments with non-animal methods has received written support from Harvard Medical School simulation expert Dr. John Pawlowski; decorated Operation Iraqi Freedom trauma surgeon and medical general counsel for the Iraq War Veterans Organization Dr. Michael Murphy; and the American Medical Student Association, among others. Neither the Air Force Expeditionary Medical Skills Institute's Center for Sustainment of Trauma and Readiness Skills nor the Navy Trauma Training Center uses animals for trauma experiments, providing practical evidence that animals are not needed.
 
Sincerely yours,
 
Shalin G. Gala
Laboratory Methods Specialist
Laboratory Investigations Department