2. The Current Use of Live Pigs and Goats in Combat Casualty Care Training and Live Vervet Monkeys in Chemical Casualty Care Training

The U.S. military’s current use of animals in chemical and combat casualty care training programs includes courses conducted by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Special Operations Command, as well as private contractors such as Assessment and Training Solutions (ATS), Tier 1 Group, and Deployment Medicine International (DMI). In 2007, more than 8,750 animals were used for this training, including 60 vervet monkeys and more than 5,000 goats and 3,500 pigs.

Military combat casualty care courses using animals occur on at least 18 U.S. facilities, including military bases such as Fort Bragg, Fort Sam Houston, and Fort Campbell, and facilities run by private contractors, including ATS’ facility in Virginia Beach. Va. and DMI’s facility in Partlow, Va. Documents obtained by PCRM through the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that, between July 2005 and September 2007, various branches of the U.S. military had 64 contracts with ATS and paid the private company a total of more than $4 million for its services. FOIA responses are still pending for information regarding most of these contracts, but a response from the Navy’s Fleet & Industrial Supply Center in Norfolk, Va. shows that the agency paid ATS $65,088 in March 2007 for a two-day course involving live pigs.

In some U.S. military and military contractor combat casualty care training courses, such as those carried out at Schofield Barracks, ATS, and other facilities, pigs are subjected to gunshot wounds while trainees attempt to keep the animals alive, resulting in prolonged suffering and death. In a 2006 New York Times article, one soldier reported that he was charged with keeping an anesthetized pig alive for as long as possible after the animal was subjected to serious injuries, saying of the pig that, “they shot him twice in the face with a 9-millimeter pistol, and then six times with an AK-47 and then twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. And then he was set on fire.” The soldier kept the pig alive in this condition for fifteen hours.¹

The use of pigs and goats for combat casualty care training is suboptimal due to, among other issues, the animals’ anatomical and physiological differences from humans. Compared with humans, pigs, and goats have smaller torsos and limbs, thicker skin, different responses to anesthesia and analgesia, and important differences in anatomy of the head and neck, internal organs, limbs, blood vessels, and airway.

A recent paper by Vance Y. Sohn, M.D., and colleagues describes Madigan Army Medical Center’s (Tacoma, Wash.) Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) course, which involves subjecting goats to serious injuries, including amputation and induced hemorrhage. As highlighted in the article, since “[t]he goat model is not ideal for venous access,” many trainees are unable to properly secure intravenous (IV) access in the goats, causing some of the goats to suffer fatal hypovolemic shock and hypothermia.² Because placing an IV is crucial to proper combat casualty care, this admission points out a glaring shortfall in the use of animals for TCCC training. Additionally, pigs are known to develop hyperthermia and a variety of abnormal physiological responses when given anesthesia, and also are susceptible to fatal ventricular fibrillation. Intubation training is fundamentally inapplicable to humans because of profoundly different airway anatomy in pigs and goats.³

As a result of these differences, it is impossible to mimic human wounds, skin injuries (e.g., burns); altered baseline and injury-related physiology; airway control; or correlations for head, facial, and limb injuries; vascular access; and hemorrhage treatment in pigs and goats. Differences related to vascular anatomy, access, and hemorrhage may have particular importance, since uncontrolled hemorrhage is by far the major cause of death for wounded soldiers.

In the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense’s “Management of Chemical and Biological Casualties Course” and “Field Management of Chemical and Biological Casualties Course,” vervet monkeys are given an overdose of the chemical physostigmine during the courses’ “Chemical Casualty Resuscitation Practical Exercise.” The exercise takes place at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The overdose of physostigmine, a cholinesterase inhibitor, acts as a nerve agent inducing cholinergic crisis, symptoms of which include severe diarrhea, vomiting, severe bradycardia, and sometimes death.⁴  While the medical personnel do provide “supportive therapy in the form of assisted ventilation,” the primary function of this exercise is observation. The animals involved are subjected to this procedure four times per year until they are reassigned to other research protocols.⁵ Repeated exposure to physostigmine is known to cause serious complications, including fatality.

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