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U.S. Army veterans want to know: Why would the service mutilate dogs, cats, and other animals with weapons in experiments?
That’s why over 250 Army veterans have joined forces with PETA and sent a letter calling on Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth to ban all weapon-wounding tests on animals from her branch of the service. In these tests, experimenters are permitted to wound cats, dogs, primates, and marine animals with various weapons—just to see what happens.
Aside from their blatant cruelty, weapon-wounding tests are entirely useless to humans for the same reasons that all experiments on other animals don’t produce human-relevant results: The vast anatomical and physiological differences between species render such tests useless.
Why Would the Army Embrace Junk Science?
The Army, which previously banned weapon-wounding tests on cats, dogs, primates, and marine animals, is making its testing process worse by reversing precedent and resuming these gruesome, unscientific experiments. On the contrary, the 59th Medical Wing of its military peer, the U.S. Air Force, adopted a policy in 2022 stating that its program doesn’t use these animals in training, research, or development.
One wonders why the Army would resume these tests. It’s not for a lack of options: Superior, animal-free models are widely available for any test they could need to perform.
The Army Is Being Shady About Its Weapons-Wounding Tests
In early 2020, the Army quietly reversed its previous ban on weapon-wounding testing in the unassumingly named “Policy 84,” which overturned decades of precedent by permitting the use of cats, dogs, primates, and marine animals “to inflict wounds upon using a weapon.”
In March 2022, PETA filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documentation of these tests. What we got back was suspicious: Even though the command responsible for Policy 84 initially stated that it had at least 2,000 responsive records, it later backtracked, claiming to have only one experimental protocol, which the Army conveniently declared “classified … in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”
The Army also appears to be learning that bad science leads to bad results: In 2023, following pressure from PETA, the service ended its nonsensical and cruel brain-damaging weapon-wounding experiment on ferrets.
Using Animals as Targets Is Barbaric
There is no legitimate justification—classified or otherwise—for using weapons to inflict gruesome injuries on animals.
Please join the hundreds of Army veterans who are asking Secretary Wormuth to drop these bloody, unscientific tests that waste American taxpayer dollars:
