The US military will stop its practice of shooting pigs and goats to help prepare medics for treating wounded troops in a combat zone, ending an exercise made obsolete by simulators that mimic battlefield injuries.
The prohibition on “live fire” training that includes animals is part of this year’s annual defense bill, although other uses of animals for wartime training will continue. The ban was championed by Vern Buchanan, a Republican congressman from Florida who often focuses on animal rights issues.
Buchanan’s office said the defense department will continue to allow training that involves stabbing, burning and using blunt instruments on animals, while also allowing “weapon wounding”, which is when the military tests weapons on animals. Animal rights groups say the animals are supposed to be anesthetized during such training and testing.
Kristi Noem in absolute shambles…
Jfc TIL the US military used animals as shooting dummys 😰
As awful as that is, Trump wants to use US cities as training grounds
What? No. They used animals for medic training. The animals are completely out and feel no pain, it’s for medics to learn on live flesh and blood injuries. Simulators are just as good now, so it’s surprising they still did this in some trainings but this wasn’t a “the military just blasted live animals as shooting practice”
Buchanan’s office said the defense department will continue to allow training that involves stabbing, burning and using blunt instruments on animals, while also allowing “weapon wounding”, which is when the military tests weapons on animals. Animal rights groups say the animals are supposed to be anesthetized during such training and testing.
Last sentence in the body of the post. You didn’t even have to fully open the damn article.
It’s says it in the first sentence of the article …
The US military will stop its practice of shooting pigs and goats to help prepare medics for treating wounded troops in a combat zone …
Correct, for medics. They sedate the animals and then shoot them. They wouldn’t be able to do anything medic wise on an animal that’s been shot. Especially a pig. They’re going to be insanely hard to catch. I don’t know where you’re getting that they just shoot them for target practice.
Has Trump posted yet that this is radical woke nonsense and the pointless shooting of animals for training purposes will continue regardless of the fact that better training methods are available? You know he’s going to.
In had to double check to make sure this wasn’t !upliftingnews@lemmy.world because it has that unique feeling of:
“Great news! They are going to stop doing that!”
“THEY WERE DOING THAT???”
Yeah that’s some real orphan crushing machine.
I had the same thought. I had no idea this was a thing and now I’m just stunned.
Can anyone clarify this: so the army used to shoot live pigs and goats while awake and now they’re stopping this practice? Or were the animals asleep when they were shot?
And now they’re stopping this but will continue to stab, burn, and beat the shit out of sleeping pigs and goats?
Either way, wtf…
I got the chance to do this training as a non-medic through a private military contractor company, paid for by my unit, for my first deployment to Afghanistan. We were part of the pilot program for the TCCC (trauma combat casualty care) training (the same program went into effect years later, but HEAVILY watered down on training requirements). The ‘live tissue lab’ was only after about two weeks of intense classroom training with testing after and required scores to progress after every few days. It was taught by a few prior air force PJ’S and some trauma surgeons. It was the equivalent of all the trauma training medics get without the drug portions (since we are not medics, we are not allowed to push drugs).
On the day of the live tissue lab there was an ethics briefing along with a veterinarian briefing telling us all the do’s and dont’s and when to alert him or one of the techs. Basically, they are all hogs that were bought off slaughter farms but did not meet standards for food consumption and were going to get killed anyways but not used (think sick/diseased or possible deformity or injuries). The pigs are drugged up with everything you can imagine and completely disassociate. Part of the briefing from the vet was the signs to look for if the drugs were wearing off and when to grab them to drug them up more. The training went through hands on portions of everything we saw in class and real use of all the products and techniques we were trained on. It was to this day the best trauma training I have ever been through, seen, or heard of.
There are many people that want to argue about the ethics of it, and having been through it I actually side with the training. There was one guy in our unit that got hit with an indirect missile strike on base and was saved by one of the guys who went through the training and was only able to save him because of what he learned and his experience he went through. That training unquestionably saves lives.
I was a medic in the USAF about a decade ago - training is a joint program of USAF, Army, and Navy, so we all saw the same stuff.
None of our training used animals, dead or alive. We did hear about it though: I got the impression it was something they did for the special-ops folks, which do have medical positions.
For non-special-ops medics like me, we just used mannequins. …and even back then, the mannequins for combat training were fancy enough to squirm, scream, and pump out buckets of fake blood while you’re trying to put on a tourniquet.
I don’t think live animals would have contributed anything. Like on one hand I guess there’s value in knowing that if you fuck up the simulation, something will die, so it might make trainees take it more seriously… but on the other hand, it would also detract from the training by introducing an unethical practice, and one thing we don’t want to train our medics to do is second-guess whether or not they should be patching someone up in the middle of doing just that.
Are they going to start shooting ICE detainees instead?
Iirc they’ll be using gell dummies again. Treating live animals was a way of desensitizing medics to trauma shock. Seeing a living thing in pain creates a startle effect that’s important to train out to save lives. I don’t like the idea, but it makes sense…
I mean ER doctors and surgeons get patients with the same wounds and as far as I know don’t shoot live animals in med school.
ER doctors and surgeons have the privilege of being able to watch live surgeries during training, and doing their first live surgeries with safe supervision. The first time a field medic is trying to save a life in a live situation, it’s rather likely that they don’t have any supervisor on hand, and that someone is actively trying to kill them.
Why wouldn’t a future field medic be able to do time in emergency rooms where they are almost certain to see a variety of injuries that would compare to many types of battlefield injuries?
Oh, that would absolutely be great!
However, it’s worth noting that the common field medic is a far less qualified surgeon/doctor than the typical doctor in training that’s doing surgery at an ER under supervision. A field medics job is to pack wounds, apply chest seals, and do other critical life-saving work, while possibly under fire, so that the wounded survive until they get to a place where actual ER doctors can treat them.
As such, you need to give them some form of live training at doing those things, without requiring the resources it would take to train them to a point where it’s responsible to let them work on civilians at an ER under supervision. Basically, field medics work in the interim where you definitely need them in the field (significantly more qualified at saving lives than the common soldier), while you very likely don’t want them working on civilians in an ER (significantly less qualified than actual trauma surgeons).
Paramedics and EMTs see things in the setting in happened in. Same lack of shock training before doing it live.
It’s about psychology under fire. The doctors that treat gunshot wounds in a safe, secure ER don’t have to be trained to do so in life threatening situations when the patient can’t be moved to a secure location.
EMTs -do- sometimes experience this, and as someone who knows a former EMT, the experience is psychologically devistating when you’re there on-scene watching someone die.
I would never advocate for causing harm or distress in the name of training. That said, if you needed to desensitize an 18yo wannabe doctor, sticking him in a field with a bunch of pigs, where a drill instructor shoots one right next to them and they have to stabilize the wound right away… Yeah, that’s probably really good training for that specific role…
Target practice is in the Caribbean Sea now
Probably not: the airlines providing flights for the unconstitutional deportation scheme are making a killing out of their deal with the regime. They won’t make any money flying corpses: they need living deportees to fly to foreign concentration camps.
So no,. The ICE detainees will live to see another day in Trump hell…
I’m not convinced they wouldn’t just charge ekstra for corpses.
Sounds woke. I hope they didn’t tell Hegseth.
“Animal rights group say the animals are supposed to be anesthetized”?
What. The. Fuck?
“Human rights group say the nazis should anesthetize the jews before gassing them”
How can you be part of a group supposed to defend animal rights, and yet be fine with the idea that a bunch of braindead psychos is going to take them and stab them for fun, as long as the animals are sleeping?
well, people still say they love animals even when they eat them
I just love some animals more than others.
I don’t see pickets of people trying to save the mosquitoes. And at some point, at least for now, you kind of have to choose between human lives and mosquito lives. I think most people just have some intuitive idea of what should and shouldn’t be killed, have not thought much about it, but are still horrified at people that have chosen different boundaries. Personally mine has a lot of ambiguity and depends vaguely on number of neuron’s in the individual and number of individuals being killed but a lot of the time, and that includes the articles scenario, it’s a trade off
