What the hell are you thinking?
Chris Collins, John Katko, Claudia Tenney.
Honestly, what the hell are you thinking?
Three Republicans, put in office by conservatives, and you’re siding with animal rights activists over the interests of wounded American servicemembers?
You’ve decided an actress knows more about combat medics than the Pentagon does?
You’ve decided that soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines can die so that pigs and goats can live?
What the hell are you thinking?
At issue is a proposal in the House of Representatives called the Battlefield Excellence through Superior Training Practices Act – the BEST Practices Act. It’s House Resolution 1243.
The explanatory paragraph about it on the government’s website says:
“This bill requires the Department of Defense (DOD), by no later than: (1) October 1, 2020, to complete the development, testing, and validation of human-based training methods for training members of the Armed Forces in the treatment of combat trauma injuries, with the goal of replacing live animal-based training methods; and (2) October 1, 2022, to use only use human-based training methods for such purposes. No animals may be used in such training after the latter date.”
Chris Collins, John Katko and Claudia Tenney have all signed on as supporters. Katko and Tenney have joined Louise Slaughter and all the other progressives as cosponsors.
Collins went so far yesterday as to Tweet out a picture of himself standing next to Tony Soprano’s wife in front of his congressional office.
“Today I met with actress Edie Falco to discuss combating live-animal mutilation training, and I have decided to sign on to H.R. 1243-Best Practices Act. She is a dedicated advocate and I am impressed by all of her hard work and passion.”
Get a room.
And get a clue.
Because this issue isn’t complex.
You’re either there for GIs bleeding out on the battlefield or you’re not.
Here’s the background. The military trains a variety of its members to provide emergency medical care to those wounded in battle. Your son gets shot, and some 19- or 20-year-old is going to crawl over and try to keep him alive. Your daughter gets blown up by an IED, somebody else’s daughter has got to save her life.
That requires skill.
And skill requires training.
Training in the first aid and surgical procedures that determine whether or not an American son or daughters bleeds out and dies right there, or gets patched up enough to make it back to a field hospital and have a chance to live.
That skill, to see and react calmly and appropriately to a gaping wound with pooling blood and waning life, takes training you can’t get from a PowerPoint. There isn’t an app or a computer simulation that will truly teach you how to find and tie off a spurting femoral artery. You can’t cut a tracheotomy on a rubber dummy.
You need a real wound with real blood and a real life in your hands.
And that’s how American combat medics are trained. Whether it’s a Green Beret or a Navy Seal or one of those guys the Marines call “Doc.” The American military turns young men and women, most with nothing more than a high school diploma, into lifesavers.
Ask anyone who brought home a combat wound.
And here’s one of the ways the military trains combat medics how to deal with traumatic battlefield injuries.
They take pigs and goats, and put them under a general anesthetic. Then they shoot them. Or pepper them with shrapnel. Or set off an explosive near them.
They injure them exactly the way American heroes are injured.
And they have GI medics save them.
Because pigs and goats are about the same size as humans. Their organs and bodily systems are similar to ours. Stopping the bleeding and stitching the wound of an animal gives these young medics the skills necessary to do the same for a human.
Teaching a 19-year-old how to put the organs back in the abdominal cavity of a pig enables him to do the same thing to his wounded buddy.
And maybe that wounded buddy gets to live as a result.
It’s common sense. You don’t want a combat medic’s first face-to-face meeting with a real gunshot wound to be the one in your son’s chest.
The better trained the medic, the more likely your son is to survive.
And these pigs and goats are the key to that training. That is the position of the Defense Department, and the medical branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
But maybe Edie Falco and PETA know better.
Maybe, from where they sit, the lives of those animals are more important than the lives of privates and seamen, lieutenants and gunnery sergeants.
In the training, the animals are under medical anesthesia the entire time. When the procedures are completely, the animals – still unconscious – are euthanized, the same way veterinarians euthanize countless American pets. The animals never feel any pain or discomfort.
But they do give their lives – that American servicemen and women might live.
And lest we feign outrage at the loss of these animals’ lives, it’s worth noting that pork is the most commonly eaten meat on the planet, and that goat is the most commonly eaten meat in the Middle East.
So if a pig can die to make a congressman’s breakfast, why can’t it die to save a soldier’s life?
Seriously, Chris Collins, John Katko and Claudia Tenney – why can’t it?
And why do you support legislation that will hamstring training by pushing it into simulations and computer programs? And why does your legislation require human subjects for practice when humans can obviously not be inflicted with injuries for mere training?
Did you even look at this legislation? Does no one on your staff know how to work Google? Couldn’t anybody pick up the phone and call the Pentagon liaison people and see what they think?
Do you really believe that you and PETA know how to train combat medics better than military doctors do?
Do you not understand that reducing the quality of training will increase the quantity of death?
What the hell are you thinking?
On the upside, when you attend the funerals of constituents killed in combat, you can show their parents your cool picture of Edie Falco.