PETA, veterans push Hegseth to end decompression tests on animals

PETA and a group of veterans are pushing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to end decompression testing on animals in favor of modern testing instead.

“Our Navy should be using the best science available, not wasting millions of dollars squeezing the life out of animals in archaic experiments that do nothing to protect service members,” PETA Vice President Shalin Gala said in a statement.

“PETA calls on Secretary Hegseth to heed the calls of hundreds of veterans and embrace what works, because giving sheep the bends does not,” Gala concluded.

The letter urged Hegseth to end the Navy’s funding of decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity experiments — commonly known as “the bends” — on animals that “fail to meet that standard and instead subject animals to cruel, irrelevant tests.”

It cited a recent Navy-funded Duke University experiment that used 40 pigs to test for the bends. PETA alleged that while being tested, the pigs underwent “decompression sickness, painful blood vessel blockages, paralysis, hemorrhaging, and, for many animals, death.”

In another experiment at the University of South Florida, rats were subjects of an oxygen-toxicity experiment, resulting in “seizures and required implanted recording devices.”

The letter was signed by over 450 veterans who asked the Defense Department to prohibit its funds “from supporting decompression sickness and oxygen toxicity experiments on animals and instead direct those resources toward superior, human-relevant, animal-free research methods.”

The Hill has reached out to the Pentagon for comment.

The push comes after Congress banned the U.S. military from using live animals in any “live-fire” training — instead directing leaders to use advanced simulators, mannequins, cadavers or actors.

The practice was done to help medics prepare for treating wounds in active combat zones, though it was considered outdated because of the emergence of modern simulators, per Smithsonian magazine .