Military Torture: Not Just for Humans

President Obama has rightfully banned military torture for humans. He should grant the same protections to other animals too

Among President Barack Obama's various executive orders signed during his first 100 days was a memo banning the use of torture during military interrogations.

Soon after, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent a letter to Mr. Obama urging him to ban another kind of military torture: the use of animals in military trauma exercises.

PETA suggested that the military adopt non-animal-based tests, which they say "are readily available and already in use at several military installations. The non-animal methods include rotations in military trauma hospitals and the use of the DoD's own Combat Trauma Patient Simulator."

The American military has a long history of cruel animal testing and killing that is relatively under-reported by the mass media.

"The year after Japan's surrender, scientists loaded approximately forty-five hundred animals into navy ships, anchored them near Bikini Atoll, and detonated an atomic bomb," writes Diane L. Beers in her 2006 book For the Prevention of Cruelty: the History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States.

"Between 1957 and 1958, monkeys were placed at variable distances from ground zero in nuclear weapons tests, and throughout the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Defense authorized the irradiation of millions of rats, mice, monkeys, dogs, and other animals annually."

This sad legacy of the atomic age military industrial complex still pervades America's Department of Defense.

According to PETA, "Thousands of live animals are shot, stabbed, dismembered, burned and poisoned every year in Department of Defense (DoD) training exercises designed to train medics and infantry in how to treat various human battlefield injuries."

GET INVOLVED

• Sign a PETA petition urging President Obama to ban military trauma exercises on animals
• Sign an NRDC letter telling the Navy to stop harming whales with sonar

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• California Passes Landmark Anti-Cruelty Act (November 7, 2008)
• Whales vs. Navy in Supreme Court (October 16, 2008)
  
• Californians to Vote on Landmark Anti-Cruelty Act (September 22, 2008)
• Studying How Whales React to Sonar (August 11, 2008)
• Use of Lab Animals on the Rise in UK (July 26, 2008)
• Breeder Offers Greyhounds to Medical Research (June 2, 2008)

image: Domitian, one of the Silver Spring monkeys, in a restraint chair in 1981 inside the laboratory of Edward Taub at the government-funded Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. PETA contacted the police, who raided the laboratory on September 11, 1981, and charged Taub with 119 counts of animal cruelty, leading to a conviction on six counts, overturned on appeal. For confirmation of the monkey's name, and that this is one of the Silver Spring monkeys, see Carbone, Larry. What Animal Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 76, figure 4.2. Images of the monkeys became iconic after PETA distributed them widely in the media with the caption, "This is vivisection. Don't let anyone tell you different." (image credit: Alex Pacheco of PETA)