Edie Falco & NY Congressman Chris Collins Support Bill To End Barbaric Use Of More Than 8,500 Live Animals For Military Training

Congressman Chris Collins stands with actress Edie Falco, known for her role as a mafia wife in the television series “The Sopranos,” who is campaigning to ban the use of animals in military medical field trauma training. TWITTER/@REPCHRISCOLLINS

New York Congressman Chris Collins recently announced that he is supporting a bill that bans the “grotesque” and “unnecessary” mutilation of live animals for purposes of training military field medics.

Collins shared the news on Twitter following a November 29^th meeting with actress Edie Falco, an avid campaigner to end the use of live animals for military field trauma training.

The bill, titled “Battlefield Excellence through Superior Training Practices Act” or the “BEST Practices Act,” was introduced earlier this year but remained under most everyone’s radar until now.

“Today I met with actress Edie Falco to discuss combating live-animal mutilation training, and I have decided to sign on to H.R. 1243-Best Practices Act. She is a dedicated advocate and I am impressed by all of her hard work and passion,” Collins stated in his tweet.

Horrifically, it is estimated that the Department of Defense uses more than 8,500 live animals each year to train physicians, medics, corpsmen, and other methods of responding to severe battlefield injuries.

“The thought that you could mutilate a goat or a pig and have a medical professional or someone in the military use this as training, to then subsequently treat human beings on the battlefield, makes no sense whatsoever,” Collins told WBFO.

According to the news outlet, the Department of Defense originally recommended ending this practice in 2010.

But, as per Collins, 17 military installations are still employing this barbaric method of training.

The Buffalo-area Republican stated that sophisticated simulators exist that better mimic human subjects, from bleeding to organs, that ends the need for animals to suffer and then, when the training is finished, be put down.

Collins also told WBFO that he had reviewed testimonials from several that trained under this system who felt that they did nothing but make an animal suffer unnecessarily.