Update: Today, The Washington Post ran a cover story highlighting PETA's efforts to stop the U.S. military from killing thousands of goats and pigs each year in crude medical training drills. As the newspaper points out, a bill that was signed into law last month requires the Department of Defense to submit to Congress by the end of this week a detailed strategy and timeline for the phase-out of these deadly exercises. This is the first time in history that Congress has passed a bill that protects animals from abuse in military training exercises. Please take a moment to write to the Department of Defense and urge it to act quickly to phase out these barbaric exercises.

Originally posted on January 4th: 

The year has just begun, but already 2013 has seen an exciting first for animals! President Barack Obama has just signed into law a bill that requires the Department of Defense (DOD) to create a strategy for replacing the shooting, stabbing, and dismembering of animals in military training drills with non-animal methods. This is the first time in history that Congress has passed a bill that seeks to protect animals from being abused in military training exercises.

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The Camera Shot Seen 'Round the World

Last year, people were outraged when PETA released disturbing, never-before-seen undercover footage showing live goats as they were stabbed, had their organs yanked out, and had their limbs broken and cut off with tree trimmers during a military training drill, all while the animals moaned and kicked.

Multitudes of you contacted your representatives demanding that these archaic forms of "training" end and that the abusers who were caught on video be held accountable. You won. Under a provision in the newly signed National Defense Authorization Act, the secretary of defense has less than two months to present Congress with a strategy for phasing out the use of animals in trauma training. And the people who were caught on camera abusing goats were cited for violations of the Animal Welfare Act. 

Dummies Are Smarter

High-profile military veterans Oliver Stone, Bob Barker, and Gideon Raff have all joined you in asking the DOD to modernize its training program by replacing its deadly animal laboratories with more reliable methods such as human-patient simulators. These realistic models can breathe, bleed, talk, and even "die," and trainees can perform procedures on them over and over again until they master lifesaving skills.

While this monumental law requires the secretary of defense to create a plan to phase out the use of animals, it does not mandate a specific date by which animal training methods must end. Help us keep the pressure on by e-mailing the secretary of defense and other DOD and Department of Homeland Security officials and urging them to switch to superior non-animal training methods immediately.

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You'll never guess what one little thing shortens a woman's life span as much as if she had smoked 25,000 cigarettes.

You know about the zombie apocalypse: people attempting to eat each other. But did you know that people eating animals is also leading to something sinister: the water apocalypse? 

The U.S. military has revealed its powerful new canine service member—a robotic dog! Hopefully, this will save real military dogs from some of the more dangerous duties.

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And a British canine military hero is being honored with the highest award that an animal in the British military can receive for lifesaving devotion to duty. Theo is said to have detected more Taliban roadside bombs and weapons caches than any dog in Afghanistan to date.

Another hero dog gave his own life to pull his guardian out of the path of an oncoming train. If only people were as loyal to animals as they are to us.

But at least this man is: Check out the impressive cat tower that one guardian built to apologize to his cat for having to give him painful ear drops to treat an infection. 

New Action Alerts

Cats should be cherished, not tormented in laboratory experiments. Ask the National Institutes of Health to stop giving taxpayer money to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to conduct crude experiments in which cats have steel coils implanted in their eyes, holes drilled into their skulls, and electrodes implanted in their brains.

New Features

You can read more about the University of Wisconsin–Madison's cruel cat laboratories here.

Hip-hop artist and producer k-os always speaks up about things that matter, and he's showing everyone how to find their own voice for animals in his new PETA spot. 

Memorial Day is an occasion to remember all those who have died in the service of their country. Since the end of the draft, the U.S. has boasted about our all-volunteer armed forces. But not all those who have served have been volunteers—and many of our military casualties have worn fur or fins instead of fatigues.

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With the help of its members and supporters, PETA has brought an end to many of the cruel and lethal practices formerly inflicted on animals by military organizations. Because of these victories, ferrets, for instance, are no longer tortured in intubation experiments at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, dogs and cats aren't wounded in trauma training, and monkeys won't be forced to endure drug overdoses at the army's Aberdeen Proving Ground. But there is still work to be done.

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Please join PETA in honoring those animals who have given their lives—though unnecessarily and under duress—in U.S. military operations by assuring that more animals like them will be spared from misery and death:

• The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) stabs, cuts the limbs off, shoots, and mutilates goats and pigs in deadly and archaic training exercises for medics and soldiers, even though superior non-animal methods exist and are used in nearly every civilian hospital and in many military trauma hospitals.
• In other military tests, animals have been poisoned, irradiated, infected, burned, and blown up in order to (poorly) simulate the effects of warfare on humans.
• Other animals die on the front lines—including dogs deployed with combat troops, dolphins and sea lions used as "lookouts," birds exploited as early detectors for chemical and biological weapons, and rats forced into mine detection. Even the animals who survive their "tours of duty" can suffer for years afterward.
• Sonar equipment tested—and proposed for implementation—by the U.S. Navy has caused often-lethal hemorrhages, embolisms, and nervous system pressure in whales and dolphins.
• More than 90 desert tortoises died when they were ill-advisedly relocated from their homes on land near California's Fort Irwin so that the Army could conduct war games there. Fortunately, further relocation was suspended before more of these endangered animals died.

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Animals don't recognize differences between countries, and they don't start wars. One good way to observe Memorial Day is to send a message to the DoD asking officials to protect our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines in the line of fire—and leave animals out of it.