As previously reported by WAN, 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 battle injuries.
Pigs and goats are among the innocent animals that are shot, burned and stabbed, or have their limbs broken in order to mimic wounds that could occur on the field.
Unfathomably, this barbaric and unnecessary practice, which the Department of Defense recommended ending close to a decade ago, continues to take place at U.S. military bases despite new advances in science that make the need for using live animals obsolete.
The “Battlefield Excellence through Superior Training Practices Act” (aka) the BEST Practices Act aims to put an end to this program once and for all.
If passed, the bill would ban the expensive and ineffective trauma drills on live animals while still ensuring that our military medics and others gain the skills they need to save lives on the battlefield.
As noted in a previous WAN article posted last month, the move to pass the Best Practices Act is gaining traction because of advocates like actress Edie Falco, who is an avid campaigner to end the use of live animals for military field trauma training.
Falco’s meeting with New York Congressman Chris Collins at the end of November resulted in the Buffalo-area Republican supporting the bill that bans the “grotesque” and “unnecessary” mutilation of live animals for purposes of training military field medics.
