Animals and War -- The Military’s Hidden Violence
By Colman McCarthy
When opening a discussion in my high school, college and law school classes on Peace Studies, I ask students to call out the varicolored ways animals are preyed upon by humans.
It doesn’t take long. In only a minute, the list is long: food, clothing, recreation, jewelry, rodeos, horse and dog races, bull or cock fighting, circuses, zoos, hunting and trapping, entertainment, testing, scientific research—among others. I can’t recall anyone ever mentioning militarism and how, in the high-minded name of national security, the Department of Defense, which was once more correctly called the Department of War, tortures and kills animals.
The unawareness isn’t surprising. Only rarely do the media, print or electronic, include military violence to animals as a topic worth reporting. And when it does, the coverage is likely to favor the military. In the early 1990’s, CBS’s “60 Minutes” told the story of an ongoing Army-funded medical experiment in which some 700 cats were locked in vises and shot in the head. In the 13 minute segment, narrator Mike Wallace, someone ever touting himself as Mr. Tough Guy Interviewer, was limp and lame in reporting the controversy involving the $2.1 million research project. Inaccurate quoting, innuendo, and shifty editing prevailed. Wallace and “60 Minutes” markedly sided with Michael Carey, a professor of neurosurgery at Louisiana State University Medical School who was paid by the Army to shoot anesthetized cats to supply information that could be used for treating soldiers’ combat brain injuries. Animal rights groups opposing the experiment as medically specious and exceptionally cruel, found themselves disdained by Wallace as “zealots” and extremists opposed to breakthrough science. In the program, Carey, a colonel in the reserves, was pictured as the hero standing tall against the noisy rabble. The anti-progress heavy was Dr. Neal Barnard of the Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. In the end, thanks to pressing the issue by Barnard as a well as a Louisiana member of Congress, the General Accounting Office found the experiment to be flawed. It was eventually canceled. The main finding for the Army was that when shot in the head cats feel pain.
“Animals and War: Confronting the Military Animal Industrial Complex” is a worthy attempt as easing the imbalance between what the Pentagon, high-rolling defense lobbyists and their plaints chums in Congress are doing in the warriors war on animals and what citizens and the media need to know to stop the violence. The research in these pages is credible, the facts are grounded and the conclusions are sound. What’s here is a strong tailwind that can help push forward a morally-based movement that promises to offer humane alternatives to abusing and killing animals. Relying on publicly available information, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals reports that from 1998 to 2006 more than 11,000 animal experiments were performed by the military.
Much of the public suffers from outrage overload when it comes to the effects of American militarism, whether it is the high rates of suicide among soldiers and war veterans, the incessant reports of sexual assaults and harassment, the waste and fraud by military contractors, the uncountable killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the maintaining of more than 700 military bases around the world and since 1991 the extravagant funding by Congress to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that can’t be explained, can’t be won and can’t be afforded. By the latest tote, military and security spending is reaching well beyond $900 billion a year, more than $2.5 billion a day and close to $30,000 a second—all of it bringing to mind the thought of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967 in New York City’s Riverside Church: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
When it comes to decreasing abuse to animals, whether by the military or corporate America, is anyone really innocent and guilt-free? We dwell in homes or work in sites that once displaced animals, we pay federal taxes that legalize the slaughter of animals for profit or pleasure, we travel in cars with leather seats over roads unfenced to prevent roadkill, we attended schools that allow animal experiments in biology classes, we take drugs once tested on animals, we buy newspapers that carry adds for the meat, egg, dairy and fur industries, we shop in stores that profit from the sale of animal products, we vote for politicians who pass laws favoring subsidies to agribusiness, we pay the salaries of federal and state judges who interpret a constitution that says nothing about the welfare or rights of animals and we embrace religions that give humans dominion over animals and it’s a rare sermon where the sacredness of animals is sounded.
These pages offer a place to pause, step back and examine our complicity, as difficult as it can be to diminish it. If our path has no difficulties, it probably isn’t leading anywhere.
Colman McCarthy, a former columnist for The Washington Post, is the founder and director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington D.C. His books include “At Rest With the Animals.”