Grammy winner Diane Warren, who has written nine number-one hits, today wrote something else: a letter to military leaders at 17 bases across the United States asking them to get in sync with congressional efforts to end archaic trauma training drills on live animals and switch to using sophisticated human simulators instead.
She also donated the justice-themed track from Marshall “Stand Up for Something” — which was nominated for Best Original Song at this year’s Oscars — to PETA's campaign to modernize military training, which was endorsed by The New York Times.
The biographical film Marshall depicts the life of the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. This makes the anthemic song — with lyrics that read, “Ain’t here to judge, just to take a stand” and “make a stand for what’s right/It’s always worth, always worth the fight” — particularly meaningful to PETA, as in 1991, Justice Marshall delivered the favorable ruling on the Supreme Court’s first-ever case involving animals in laboratories. The case involved monkeys abused in a government-funded laboratory that PETA exposed.
In a letter sent on behalf of PETA, she writes, “In PETA eyewitness videos taken during similar military trauma training exercises, live pigs are shot and stabbed, and live goats have their limbs cut off with tree trimmers. … For the sake of our troops and animals, I urge you to end the use of animals in trauma training drills and switch completely to superior human simulation–based training as the Coast Guard and other military medical facilities have already done.”
