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.
They will soon be able to train on soldiers returning from Venezuela.
Another reminder that all soldiers are dangerous psychopaths.
they still 100% do this btw, they just make everyone involved sign NDA’s
I mean, you don’t need an agreement if partner nations bring the goat and if the SDF wants the training, who am I to judge them? Just means we’re eating goat tonight instead of MREs.
Kristi Noem in absolute shambles…
Nah, they are just letting her be the one to kill each and every one.
In had to double check to make sure this wasn’t [email protected] 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.
orphan crushing machine
That is a great term, holy crap. I had to look it up.
Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like “he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine” and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you’d need to pay to prevent it from being used.
I had the same thought. I had no idea this was a thing and now I’m just stunned.
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.
Yea those animals are dead or completely out. Even the animal rights groups are pointing it out. I don’t understand why you’re unable to understand this. The animals are either dead or basically dead.
It’s still pointless to do, but it’s not like the animals are conscious during it.
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.
I just audibly chuckled at the thought of some freshly-recruited chud desperately chasing after a wounded squealing pig in an attempt to try and save it before it bleeds out.
You are right that it would (hopefully) never happen that way, but that’s like a scene out of a Coen brothers movie or some shit. Fuck, I’m going to hell aren’t I
I’ve got rescue pigs and if they want to do something, you’re not stopping them. Even our little pot belly pigs are insanely strong. There is no forcing them to do something. You have to make them want to do whatever you want them to do.
O and they’re fast as hell too. No fucking way you’re patching up a shot pig that’s awake.
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).
But they can still observe, and you can put them on a messy dummy in a stressful environment and have them apply a tourniquet and seal a sucking chest wound. You can also do that on a live, writhing non-injured person (but don’t actually apply the tq to them please).
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…
they actually use a specific private one to ferry all the deportees, the commerical ones arnt the ones doing it, and certain they wont risk all that PR too.
I’m not convinced they wouldn’t just charge ekstra for corpses.
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.
Thanks for replying. But can you be more clear. For example, describe the scene. I’m having a hard time imagining how it all went down.
Were the hogs let loose in some room and you guys just shot up the hogs and then tried to save them?
How about the burning, beating, and stabbing? Did you go up to a hog with a flamethrower and lit it up then immediately try to tend to it?
Thanks again for sharing your experience.
I mean- this is where the training gets more practical, hands on, and graphic. I also don’t remember every detail, this was back in '08.
We were at a contractor school compound with shitload acreage and fields. this was set up in one of their fields. All the hogs are unloaded, drugged up, high as a kite, and on tables with a saline drip line in them for the drugs. It is all set up while we are going through the initial breifings. At no point in any time is any hog awake or aware of anything. Ever.
After the formal briefings, we start off easy with some demonstrations with a knife and cutting a leg artery and showing you what real arterial bleeding versus venous bleeding looks like with the color, the squirt, the vain retreat, then make you pressure it off then apply a tourniquet. Then they will do this on all 4 legs with everyone (groups of 4 to a pig and instructor) taking a leg. Then you start training on things like quick clot or celluclot or the other clotting agents out there to see and feel the difference and time it and all that stuff. This is where you also learn first hand how bad of a product quickclot is and to avoid it when you can (it gets to high Temps and burns both you and the patient. It was also the first generation of applied clotting agents). Then we would look at shallow cuts versus deep cuts and dressing them. IF the pig was still alive then the shooting starts and you start packing wounds.
By this point, normally your first pig has died, but they were also very clear about the value of the pigs life and that they were going to make you use up every bit you can before taking on another pig. If you can stabilize a pig, you must. If you took to long and your pig died they would get pissed because you are not just wasting resources, but you are wasting training for you and those around you, but you are also wasting a pigs life. But it was also expected to happen, you can only cut open and shoot a pig and patch it up so many times.
After your pig has died, then they go into autopsy mode and cut it open. You see not just entry and exit wounds, but also physically feel the cavity. They also cut into your clotting and show you how deep the clotting agents go and why you have to do certain things with them and avoid some areas of the body. We also looked at artery retreat from the inside so you can actually visualize how much it will retreat if done improperly. There was probably more, but I remember spending hours on just the first pig. They were sure to get every bit of training possible out of it before moving you and your team to the next pig.
The next pig, and several more after it, were all for hands on experience with more wound packing in different areas and calibers. Started with pistol, then upped to rifle (both M4 and AK47) then went to a shotgun. Most everyone was able to keep the same pug alive for all the gunshots. Then they introduce puncture wounds with a knife sticking out if it or something else. Then for the training they would keep shooting it or stabbing it again and you would just keep patching it again until it died.
Keep in mind, we were still being evaluated while doing this and getting critiques. If they felt like you were too stressed out while getting yelled at and trying to keep you pig alive, they would just ask you to step back and observe. They also pulled one or two people for them letting their pigs die too fast and basically said ‘you can only watch.’
Then things kick into high gear and it was clear why this is done at a contractor school and not at a base. It was the ‘combat care’ portion of training. So they have you start about 100 meters out and shoot your pig and do ‘something else’. You have no idea what the something else is until you get there. One time it was a hatchet to the stomach, one time it was a metal pole through it. So you have to run up with your full kit on and have half the team (2 guys) pull security while you and a partner do the first aid. You have to have your system down by now. You have to know the order to check things and you have to do it fast. All the while one instructor is yelling at you for every fuck up like he is Gordon Ramsey watching you fuck up boiling water, and you have another instructor with a gun shooting the ground a couple feet away from you and dropping firecrackers next to you. They after about a minute or two they start yelling at you to relocate (and drop in some mortar sims near by) and you have to aid and litter transport your pig around while all this continues around you. Anything you left on the ground is gone, and you just run with this pig keeping it alive till you are completely smoked. If they think you have sufficiently stableized it, they shoot it again and make you keep going.
All in all, it was a full day of just that. Our group went through maybe 20 or 30 pigs for a group of about 30 or 40 guys. Don’t remember exactly, it’s been a while. Honestly though, it was amazing training. I still remember a lot of the trauma training only because I was able to do it rather than just read about it and answer some test questions. It was the best trauma training anyone could ask for in the military, short of working on actual people. During my tour we were living next to a level two field hospital and helped out all the time (always short staffed). Even the docs commented on how good we were for not being real medics.
Feel free to ask any follow up questions.
That’s real fucked up, but it’s probably also the most effective way to train, short of doing the same thing to people.
I think that, as long as we are allowed to wage war, we should be allowed this training.
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.
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.
“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
Sounds woke. I hope they didn’t tell Hegseth.
