Each year, the German military mutilates live pigs in gruesome and deadly trauma training exercises for surgeons, even though studies confirm the superiority of human-patient simulators and regulators have blocked attempts by the U.S. Army and contractors to conduct this self-described live tissue training (LTT) in Germany.
During LTT, the German armed forces use pigs as stand-ins for troops wounded in combat and military medical personnel practice surgeries on the live, bleeding animals. Not only is this inhumane, these animals also have drastically different anatomy and physiology from that of humans, which makes maiming pigs irrelevant to human battlefield medicine.
Globally, LTT is the exception, not the rule. In 2017, the U.S. Coast Guard, following a PETA eyewitness investigation and extensive discussions with us, ended what the agency’s leader at the time called “abhorrent” trauma training on animals in favor of advanced human-simulation technology.
A landmark study published by PETA and military medical experts in the journal Military Medicine also found that nearly three-quarters of NATO member states don’t use animals in their military medical trainings. In 2010, the German military told PETA that Germany was among the nations avoiding the use of animals for training training, but the country’s Ministry of Defence later wrote to PETA to “formally apologise” for this misstatement after confirming that surgeons injure live pigs during these drills and pledged to do a “thorough examination” of non-animal training methods.
In 2020, PETA and our German affiliate fired off a letter to Germany’s defence minister calling for an end to all trauma training drills on animals, citing the widespread availability of anatomically accurate human-patient simulators and other realistic non-animal methods that can mimic severe bleeding, breathing difficulty, responses to medication, and even death in humans. We also pointed to decisions by German state authorities who, after discussions with us, repeatedly blocked applications from U.S. Army Europe to conduct similar torture drills on animals in Germany on the grounds that such lethal LTT exercises would violate the German Animal Welfare Act.
A 2020 study published in the journal Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open found that non-animal simulation training “improves surgical procedures and processes.” In a 2019 study published in the Journal of Surgical Education that examined numerous trauma training courses, such as those practiced in Germany that used live tissue (referring to the mutilation of live pigs), the researchers concluded that “no published evidence … exists suggesting that surgical skills training courses change trauma patient outcome, or improve performance of the skills taught, when performed in the real-world operating room.” This underscores how worthless animal labs are.
The post Urge the German Miltary to Stop Killing Pigs in Trauma Training! appeared first on PETA.
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