In an urgent letter addressed to the service’s commandant Gen. David Berge, Shalin Gala, PETA’s vice president for international laboratory methods, called for the military official to end the “use of live animals in food procurement survival exercises and instead use more effective and ethical non-animal training methods during Cobra Gold.”
Citing a March 1 article from UK outlet Daily Mail, the letter goes on to note that US Marines involved in the exercise have been reported to kill “chickens with their bare hands, skin and eat live geckos, consume live scorpions and tarantulas, and decapitate cobras and drink their blood.”
The annual Cobra Gold exercises involve the participation of multiple nations and are co-hosted by the US and Thailand, with the latter being where the drills are held for a period of 10 days. The 2020 event marks the 39th session of the drills, which focus on a range of military procedures from responding to large-scale disasters to providing service members with the skills to survive in the wilderness in the event of an emergency.
Aside from the vast amounts of images provided by the US Department of Defense that show participants training in the field during the ongoing drills, a portion of recently released content does capture various service members chomping down on the local Thai vegetation and drinking the blood of snakes.
A video released by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, the media arm of the Pentagon, captures the moment that multiple service members participate in jungle survival training during the 2020 exercises.
Members of the Royal Thai Marine Corps are seen demonstrating how to extract drinkable liquids from trees and identify edible fruits and vegetation; however, participants are also recorded being instructed on how to remove the venom from live scorpions and how to trap snakes.
The Monday-released video footage ends with several service members gathering together to taste one such reptile’s blood.
Although the Pentagon has indicated that the option of drinking cobra blood is used as a “last resort” by service members, according to Stars and Stripes, PETA noted in its correspondence that “there are precedents for troops to learn food procurement survival skills without having to use live animals in abhorrent training drills.”
“In 2011, the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center (MCMWTC) suspended its use of live animals in its survival training courses following discussions with PETA,” reads the letter. “Nearly three decades ago, the US Army’s Dugway Proving Ground also canceled a survival skills training course using animals after PETA asked then–Defense Secretary Les Aspin to intervene.”
“Food procurement survival training options that don’t use any animals are widely available,” Gala continues, explaining that the service can refresh its survival skills courses by integrating lessons from various wilderness curricula.
It’s unclear if Berger intends to or has responded. This year’s Cobra Gold exercises are scheduled to conclude on Friday.
