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.
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.