Thank you for your leadership and dedicated service to our country. As veterans, we’re shocked to learn that the U.S. Army is allowing cruel weapon-wounding tests on dogs, cats, marine mammals, nonhuman primates, and other animals. We respectfully ask that you prohibit the Army’s weapon-wounding tests on all animals in favor of human-relevant, animal-free methods.
The U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command’s Policy 84 now explicitly allows “[t]he purchase or use of dogs, cats, nonhuman primates, or marine mammals to inflict wounds upon using a weapon for the purpose of conducting medical research, development, testing, or evaluation.” When People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) recently sought relevant public records related to these experiments, the Army confirmed the existence of at least one such protocol for weapon-wounding testing on animals but refused to release it, claiming that it’s “classified … ‘in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.’”
Earlier this year, Politico reported that the Pentagon had exposed monkeys to “pulsed radio frequency” directed energy weapons (DEW) and that the Army had awarded $750,000 to Wayne State University through September 2023 to inflict brain injuries on 48 ferrets using radio wave DEWs, both to study anomalous health incidents associated with Havana syndrome. In addition to differences in traumatic brain injury and wound healing that exist between humans and other animals, the DEW-Havana syndrome premise has been rejected by multiple U.S. intelligence agencies.
The Army’s decision to allow weapon-wounding tests on animals is a stark reversal of past bans. In 1983, then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger issued the first-ever permanent ban on the shooting of dogs and cats in wound labs after PETA exposed one such Army plan to shoot dogs, goats, and other animals with high-powered weapons in order to inflict injuries. In 2005, the Army’s Regulation 40-33 prohibited the use of dogs, cats, other primates, and marine mammals in “[r]esearch conducted for development of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.”
We stand with the more than 59,000 people who have already called on top brass to end weapon-wounding testing on all animals. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.