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"That was my pig"

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Via Brett Mizelle, we read about the use of pigs in the training of medics serving in Iraq:

In one course, an advanced trauma treatment program he had taken before deploying, he said, the instructors gave each corpsman an anesthetized pig.
“The idea is to work with live tissue,” he said. “You get a pig and you keep it alive. And every time I did something to help him, they would wound him again. So you see what shock does, and what happens when more wounds are received by a wounded creature.”

“My pig?” he said. “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.”

“I kept him alive for 15 hours,” he said. “That was my pig.”

“That was my pig,” he said.

Brett reminds us that during the Reagan years, the armed forces conducted this kind of training with dogs. And there’s a fascinating comprehensive history to be written, if it hasn’t already, about the uses of animals during the cold war — monkeys and hounds launched into space, pigs dressed in army uniforms and deposited in the Nevada desert to root around before being obliterated by nuclear test shots, and so on. I really don’t even want to think about what might have been done to cats.

Anyhow, I don’t know why this sort of thing knocks me speechless. It’s not often, I suppose, that we find animals systematically brutalized in the name of some greater atrocity such as war. Usually, we have our way with them in the service of something more obvious and banal — a cheap meal, for instance, or tear-free shampoo.

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