February 4, 2016 • 38 mins
Warfare has always played a central role in human civilization, but we've always invited to share the rest of the animal kingdom to share in the violence and misery -- sometimes as actual weapons. Join Robert and Christian as they explore the history of weaponized animals, from flaming war pigs in ancient Greece to high-tech incendiary bats in the Second World War.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't it stuffed to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Saber.
Now you're all aware that we war is kind of
humanity's staying. It's our it's our big endeavor. It's wrapped
(00:26):
up in Uh most of our big technological gains were
great at it. Yeah, it's just ingrained in our culture
and we're not above, of course, inflicting war on the
environment as a whole, and also inviting our our fellow
animals and other members of the animal kingdom to participate
in our war at varying level, sometimes as weapons. Yeah.
(00:48):
In fact, throughout human history we've used animals. We've basically
seen them as being tools in the same way we
would see like a hammer or an axe or gun,
right in a way to extend human action in combat.
So today we're talking about weaponizing animals and how it's
been done and hypotheses on how it could be done.
(01:09):
The first place I want to go with this, though,
is and what inspired me to want to talk about
this is the another patron saint I think of Stuff
to Blow your mind, Grant Morrison's great work We Three,
which I've read, and I was surprised you hadn't. Yeah,
it's I've I've read a lot of Graham Morrison, but
I've never read that title. I've wanted to for years.
I think it's one of those that, since it's such
a short book, I was always hesitant to buy it
(01:32):
because it's I felt like, well, I'm I could get
more comic if I read this other great comic that
I haven't read yet. It's such a beautifully condensed story that,
even though it's only three issues long, uh, that you
get your bang for your buck with it. It's drawn
by Frank Quietly, who's worked with Morrison on a bunch
of other projects, and there's just amazing work with like
(01:53):
layering panels to tell the story. But the gist is
is it's sort of like the size sci fi. It's
extension of what we're going to talk about today. The U.
S Military takes a rabbit, a dog, and a cat
and mix them into cyborgs that wear exoskeletons so they
can use them on covert black ops. Uh. And they
(02:13):
send them to like kill like Mexican drug lords. Uh.
And then essentially the story is these these three animals
get out and they're on the run. All right, Yeah, well,
I definitely want to check it out at some point. Um. Now,
as we roll through these, uh, these examples and talk
about the history of of using animals as weapons, uh,
there's a lot we're gonna end up leaving out because
(02:35):
in the same way that so many human technologies are
tied in with war, our usage of animals is often
tied in with war. I mean, I mean take the
horse for example. The horse is a major Jane game
changer for war in human civilization and its earliest examples
it It gave raiders the ability to strike out across
long distances. And you can even look to its transformative effect,
(02:57):
particularly on a Native American ribes who you know who
managed to get buy for the longest without the horse.
Europeans bring the horse and you see tribes like the Comanche,
for instance, who were just just became a completely different culture,
became a horse centric cultural game change highly adept at
equestrian warfare in the aftermath of that introduction. Yeah, I mean,
(03:19):
we've used animals for all kinds of duties in warfare, right,
We used them for mounts as mounts such as horses
or elephants. Uh. We've used them for infiltration, rescue, retrieval.
I wrote um pieces for Stuff of Genius about how
ferrets have been trained to find minds in war uh,
and also to lake cable in particular wartime scenarios where
(03:40):
they're digging tunnels and things like that. So we've used
them for all of those. But in this particular episode,
we really want to hone in on how we've made
them into weapons themselves, right, where by either adding things
to them or basically rilling them up in a horrible
way to assault our enemies with. Yeah. So as we
roll into this first section, I'm actually going to read
a quote from the Bible, because this is uh. This
(04:02):
is a Biblical quote that always comes to mind when
the topic of weaponized animals comes up. All right, this
is from Judges fifteen four in it uh, and involves
Sampson that you know, sort of herculean figure of old Testament,
Samson with the hair, Yeah, yeah, Samson with the hair
the one. Yeah. He gets his hair eventually all shaved off.
(04:23):
He can't, he loses all his strength, but then he
grows it back and he pushes down some pillars, and
he's saying, in other cases he kills a thousand men
with a jaw bone of a donkey. He's like a superhero.
He's like the Bible superhero. Yeah, he's a he's a violent,
violent man um and in this particular instance, he's engaging
uh in the weaponization of animals. Says it goes like this.
(04:46):
Samson and said to them this time I shall be
blameless in regard to the Philistines when I do them harm.
Samson went and caught three hundred foxes and took torches
and turned the fox's tail to tail and put one
torch the middle between two tales. When he had set
fire to the torches, he released the foxes into the
standing grain of the Philistines, thus burning up both the
(05:09):
shocks and the standing grain, along with the vineyards and groves.
So this sounds kind of fantastic, right, It sounds like
a myth or is. And I don't know if if
if Sampson actually did this, or if somebody did do
this with foxes before, but our first piece of weaponized
animals in warfare is in fact using them as incendiary devices. So, uh,
(05:31):
whether it's done with foxes or not. I don't know,
but we've got war pigs. Uh. And uh, that's not
just a black Sabbath reference. Uh. In ancient Megara in
Greece in two hundred and fifty five BC, the city
was under attack from Macedonian conqueror Antigonus the second, and
the mcgarren's used a countermeasure by doing the same thing
(05:54):
that Sampson did, although a little bit more brutally. They
rounded up all their pigs, they doused them in pitch,
and then they set them on fire. Then they pushed
them out the city gates and outside the city this
is where the Macedonians had all their camps set up. Right,
So these terrified burning pigs are running around, and they
run into the camps and they set these tents on fire,
and then the Macedonians road war elephants, and the elephants
(06:17):
were terrified of these burning pigs, as you would be. Uh.
And the elephants subsequently lost total control and trampled a
number of the Macedonians. Now this is a ballsy move
for a besieged city. Say all right, we're gonna show them.
Let's take all these food animals we have here, and
let's just set them on fire and send them out. Yeah.
Maybe they just had a surplus of pigs that year.
(06:38):
I don't know. I mean they there was a gamble, right,
I guess they said, hey, we could keep these pigs
and eat them as we would continue to be. If
they won, they could still eat them, right Like, I
guess if there's just these burning pig corpses outside, they
could theoretically drag them back in the incentives for those
to go out to kill the dying. No one out
(06:59):
there would guess that I'm the vegetarian on something lay
or night. But yeah, So some accounts say that Antigonus
was so badly plagued by this particular strategy that he
actually started training his war elephants to mingle with pigs
on a regular basis so that they wouldn't be scared
of them, whether they were on fire or not. I
don't know if he actually like set pigs on fire
(07:21):
and had his animals hang out with these fire pigs. Yeah,
it's inexpensive too, uh. And this was done again later,
not with pigs, but with camels. A thousand years later,
the Tuco Mongol leader Teamore was said to have used
flaming camels against Indian elephants in warfare. So the same
thing he said, a bunch of camels on fire and
(07:42):
sent them on their way against these elephants. I'm imagining,
like I think, like most people, if they don't immediately
go to the Hannibal elephant story, which we're gonna get into,
they think of Lord of the Rings and those giant
elephants that they're writing in that, And I'm wondering why
the elves just didn't set a bunch of pigs on
fire and Lord of the rigs and send them on
their way towards those what do they call those elephants?
(08:04):
They were like they were like elephants variation of elephant.
It was like, yeah, like some kind of dire elephant
masted on type of thing. Yeah, okay, uh, fun little
aside here, I'm talking about weaponizing a camel um And
granted this involves essentially the use of a camel as
a mount, but then also as a weapons platform. Uh.
(08:25):
The There's this a Turkish tradition of the Zemburic, which
is essentially camel mounted weaponry. The earliest examples are you
have a crossbow that's mounted on the saddle, then you
have powdered guns, and then eventually this evolves to feature
rapid fire gatling guns that are mounted on a swivel. Now,
you didn't fire this while the camel was standing, but
(08:48):
what you would do is you would get the animal
to kneel and then you would fasten each leg to
accord to keep it from moving because you're about to
fire at gatling gun on its back. And I think
the average camel might be a little bit spooked by that.
That sounds like the kind of thing that would fit
in really well and like a D and D campaign.
Like you've got your proficiency with mounted animals and then
(09:11):
you add your proficiency with like arranged weapons to that.
Mount your mount your gatling gun on a dragon or something. Yeah,
and if you want to see a picture of one
of these, I'll include a link to a post I
did about this on the landing page for this episode.
So the incendiary animals doesn't end there either. We've got
monkeys doing this in China and not to themselves, yand you.
(09:32):
Rebels in China apparently attacked the Song dynasty in the
twelfth century, So the imperial army, not the rebels. The
army lit a bunch of monkeys on fire and unleashed
them into the ends you camp presumably would you know,
to burn down their tents had caused general terror to
just run around and young and spread fire. I've also
read that during the Opium War in the mid nineteenth
(09:54):
century that the Chinese were, you know, trying to destroy
damage the English ships. Uh. And they start by looking
into using fire rafts, and they actually went forward with
a plan to send fireworks laden monkeys onto the boats. Uh.
And to the point that they actually acquired the monkeys
move them to an advanced base. But then some defeats
(10:15):
pushed the initiative back and nothing never came of it.
But they had the monkeys, they were ready to do it.
This is gonna be a common theme in today's episode
that we've experimented with using animals as weapons a lot,
and then just before we're about to do it, we
back off and we say, wait, we figured out something
else that's even worse that doesn't involve animals. Yeah, because
time and time again, it seems like a simple fix.
(10:36):
It seems like it's just as simple as Samson saying
that Samson saying, Hey, I'm gonna burn them down. I'm
gonna just light some fire on the back of these
foxes and send them on. But then you have to
do all of these steps. You have to do training,
you have to work in the technology, and eventually there
is a better, more simple and dependable method out there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
especially with modern technology. It's really kind of caps off
(10:56):
around World War Two, which is where we're gonna go next.
So you get used to setting animals on fire and
sending them out your enemies, what's the next step strapping
bombs to them and sending them out your enemies. So
a lot of you out there have probably heard of this.
This is the most common example that's brought up with
the weaponization of animals. But if you haven't, we're going
to talk about anti tank dogs. Now. This is during
(11:17):
World War Two. The Soviet Army UH was training dogs
beginning in nineteen thirties, so actually just before they gotten
into major battles with Germany, they were training them to
carry explosives towards wide range targets, then released the bomb
and then run away, and then they would have like
a remote detonator for the bomb. What this evolved into
(11:38):
was in nineteen forty one, they started training the dogs
by hiding food on the undersides of tanks, and they
would underfeed these dogs so they be malnourished dogs who
are looking for food. They basically teach them the place
to find food is under tanks. Uh, And then they
would strap ten to twelve kims of high explosives and
four pouches to these dogs like in a little backpack.
(12:00):
In fact, recently on social media kind of teased our
audience with what we're gonna be talking about today by
posting an illustration of this from from the time We've
landed a very lighthearted place here. Um, starved dogs that
are laden with explosives. It gets worse. They've been a
spring loaded trigger sticking up on their back. Right. So
the the idea here is they train these dogs ago
(12:21):
looking for food under tanks. They sent them off towards
the Germans. The dogs crawl under German tanks and then
when they stand up to look for the food, they
pushed the pin into the bottom of the tank. Boom
goes the explosives and kills the dog. Right. Uh. You know,
I guess this is better than setting the dogs on
fire because it's pretty instantaneous death. But it's still pretty horrific. Unfortunately,
(12:43):
it didn't quite work out for the Russians as they planned,
because German tanks use petrol and Russian tanks used diesel.
So what would happen was the dogs would you know,
they've they're operating more on their sense of smell when
they're looking for something to eat, so they would end
up heating act to where they came from smelling the diesel.
They would also run away because of the loud noises
(13:05):
of gunshots and explosions during battle, so they would often
either end up under Soviet tanks or they would dive
into Soviet trenches and then explode. So okay. The Germans
also caught wind of this from capturing some prisoners, and
during interrogation, the prisoners were like, yeah, we're training dogs
and strapping bombs to their backs and uh. So the
Germans had a policy at this point they would just
(13:27):
shoot any dogs on site. Once they learned this, so
any dogs that they came in contact with they would
just immediately shoot them from far away. Uh And then
earlier there were border skirmishes with Japan in which Russia
sent mine carrying dogs. They tried to train them to
open the hatches on the top of tanks and then
drop the minds in that would explode. Apparently these mines
(13:48):
were somehow set to explode in proximity to metal, so
the metal of the tanks would would would make the
minds explode then too. So the idea here is when
strapping explosives to a dog make the task is complicated,
it is possible. Oh yeah, you can make it even worse.
The Japan also used dogs in World War Two, but
instead of giving them little backpacks, they would strap little
(14:08):
carts to them that they pulled behind them that were
filled with fifty pounds of explosives, and they would detonate
those remotely. And my impression was, this isn't the situation
where they would let the dogs deliver the goods and
then come back. They blew the dogs up as well.
They reportedly used this when Japan attacked Malaysia and Hong Kong. Uh.
And then we in the US also tested this. Uh.
(14:31):
We tested it with time bombs though uh. What ended
up happening was the dogs would end up running back,
similar to the Soviet situation. They'd run back to their owners.
They never actually made it into battle, and it was
just deemed inefficient. Yeah, they're the US uh briefly flirted
with the use of explosive dogs. Um. They even started
a trial program at Virginia's uh Fort Belvoir in nineteen three. Uh.
(14:55):
They they labeled them demolition wolves, which is interesting because
the American affinity for dogs. I feel like they they
had to just linguistically take a step back from that
and say, oh, well, they're not bomb dogs, they're uh,
they're Timolian wolves. Yeah. So, but they were looking at
working on using them as bunker busters. So the aim
(15:15):
here was to train them to enter Japanese tunnels and
fortifications while wearing twenty pounds of explosives either timed or
remotely detonated by a three d foot electrical wire. So,
as you mentioned, one of the problems dog or wolf
is trailing behind electrical wire. Who just to keep it simple. Now,
as as you mentioned one of the problems, it was
(15:37):
always worried that the dog would return to the friendlies,
returned to the U. S. Marines and explode, or that
donated dogs would be hard to come by when it
became known that this is what the military was using
them for. Yeah, and and so this gets kind to
kind of the heart of why I think we don't
see this as much in present day as because it's
just kind of considered barbaric and unethical actually with you know, dogs,
(16:01):
which are sort of man's best friend, right, and then
that that would be the last animal that we would
want to do this with. Although you know, uh, there's
you We're we're not going to specifically hone in on this,
but the dolphin usage in wartime has been rumored to
have been we should, uh imply that the conspiracy guys
(16:22):
should do an episode on dolphin weaponization because as far
as I could find, there's no evidence that dolphins are
actually weaponized. They are used by the military, uh for
for you know, research missions or you know, finding minds
or rescue operations, but there's no actual evidence in the
military denies every time somebody says, oh yeah, you're strapping
(16:44):
like missile launchers to to dolphin backs. Now, not too
long after this whole demolition wolves the scenario, the US
also experimented with dogs his mind detectors, um, and this
is up being something we do to this day. The
US military still uses bomb dogs. You know, we're talking
highly trained explosive sniffing animals, but at the time this
(17:05):
was a rougher procedure. In the training, they found that
of the minds were discovered by the dogs, the dogs
were actually really good at sniffing off the minds, but
they also didn't want the dogs detonating the minds, so
they tried to train them to fear the minds, and
this made up most of the dogs been afraid of
all metal objects, including their own food bowls, to the
(17:27):
point where only six of these dogs were ever actually
sent into combat. Only six were able to to to
exit training um with with the correct level of fear
regarding metal objects. Well, you know, I'm in the middle
of training a new dog right now. I I can sympathize.
I'm having trouble just getting our new dog to walk
up and downstairs. What's a complicated thing, right, manipulating another
(17:48):
organism's behavior, like knowing how it is evolved to behave
and then warping that to your own benefit. Be it
just the benefit of living calmly in a house or
dealing with explode. Yeah, it's sort of teaching them what
the rules of the world are is a lot more
difficult than we would think that it would be. Uh. So, yeah,
(18:08):
we mentioned there's Hannibal's elephants. Those were notoriously used in
military operation. Uh, there's the dolphins that I talked about before.
We've got to get to John C. Lily. We keep
talking about this, but somebody just asked me about on
social media if we were going to do something around
telepathy and dolphins, and I thought, we just gotta we
(18:29):
gotta dive right into that John C. Lily episode. Yeah,
we need to order some books and then move forward.
But yeah, I mean dogs are still used today as
recently as in two thousand five, there was a dog's
suicide bomb that was reported in Cokirk by bomber in Iraq.
The dog was killed, but no humans were hurt in
that scenario. So people are still strapping bombs to dogs.
(18:51):
And fortunately that we have other explosive sniffing animals like
I was talking about with those ferrets that are particularly
good at seeking out minds. I believe there I've been
some excellent projects involving rats as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Alright,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
more weaponized animals. Alright, we're back. So one of the
(19:19):
most insane stories that I came across when we were
researching this involved bats. Same idea. Strap some explosives or
in this case they are incendiary devices to bats and
then drop them on your enemy. And it's crazy because
it seems like the one of the last animals you
would choose, right, But apparently it was rather efficient. So
(19:41):
this was his idea. Okay, Robert, you take the bats
and you put them into an egg shaped container and
you drop them over your target. It's like a bomb
full of bats. Yeah. Uh. And it's it's got a
parachute and it opens right so at the level, so
the bats can fly off and they can go and
land and hide and addicts and barns and homes all
(20:03):
the kinds of places that bats normally go to. Right.
They're searching for, you know, tight enclosed, dark spaces. Uh.
And then these bats have these explosives on them that
are radio controlled and we set them off remotely. We
actually prototyped this. So this was his idea that he
just wrote in a letter. Can imagine like today, like
I write to Barack Obama and I say, I got
(20:26):
an idea. What if we strap bombs to bats? You know,
like that would just immediately go in the junk pile
finish the letter, right, yeah, exactly, but no, at that time,
not only did they read it, but they went this
is a pretty good idea and then put it into uh,
put it into prototype, so that they in the nineteen forties,
(20:47):
the U. S. Government actually tested this. They accidentally set
an Air Force base in Carl's Bad, New Mexico on
fire testing with bats. So this task involved basically two
teams here and this is where you can really imagine
the mini series unfolding, right. So one involved a few
men who had to scout cave throughout the American Southwest
(21:09):
to find both the variety of bat that that they
could use and a place where they could be captured
in the necessary quantities. So you have to hit that
sweet spot, right. It needs to be something you can
strap explosives to, but it needs to be something you
can find in large enough amounts. It needs to be
something that you can handle, that you can feed, that
(21:30):
you can store. And that's why they end up deciding
on this Mexican freetail bat. Alright, so we've got the bats,
We've got an egg shaped container form, right, how do
we strap these tiny little bombs to the and this
this is the other area where it gets crazy, right,
because because each of what they come up with is
basically a marvel of explosive engineering. We're talking one ounce bombs.
(21:55):
Each one is an oblong uh nitro cellulose case filled
with thickened kerostene essentially napalm and a delayed action timer,
and when ignited, the capsule produces a two foot long
flame for eight solid minutes. Geez yeah, okay, yeah, so
it's not like a little so much more than I
(22:18):
expected that when I was initially reading about this. Yeah,
I mean they engineered the heck out of this problem.
They said, oh, you want to you want a bat
to explode, Well, we're gonna make it as explosive as
humanly POSSI. This is like the kind of like steampunk
weaponry that I can imagine in like some kind of
video game nowadays, like a BioShock or something like that,
Like you now have the power to send out a
(22:39):
swarm of bats that are covered in explosive Yeah, I
guess it would be. You could think of it as
like what animal punk or something. I don't know. There's
gonna be a whole new literature genre based around this.
So yeah, the Marines tested this. They built a mock
up of a Japanese city and they dropped the bats
on it, and the test was deemed a success. They
spent two million dollars on testing this project, and then
(23:03):
they canceled it. And the reason why was they felt
the the U. S. Government felt that it was moving
along too slowly, so they moved all of those resources
into focusing on the atom bomb uh and, which we
now know was used and and and was fairly successful. Adams,
the guy who came up with this idea and wrote
the letter initially, was later interviewed and he reportedly said
(23:26):
that his bat bomb plan would have caused much as
much structural damage as an A bomb, but there wouldn't
have been as much loss of life. So he wished
that they had stuck with the bat bomb plan rather
than moving into atomic weaponry. It's still amazingly that we
ended up spending millions of dollars on it, though, And
I have a few other tidbits here from just the
(23:46):
kind of wackiness of this whole endeavor. So the idea
for deployment was that they would keep the bats in
cool hibernation in that big egg bombay and then they'd
wake up when the bomb containing them opened at the
appropriate altitude. But in the test, many of the bats
died when they didn't wake up before ground impact. They're
just landing. That was something I was wondering about. Two
(24:07):
is like how they're packed in there right, because I'm picturing, like,
you know, bats like to hang from things. Do they
just like stuff this thing until it was full of
a thousand bats, but you know they have like little
I don't know, compartments for each bat. Yeah. And then
and then in the test too, and I'm presuming that
they were not laden with explosives at this point, they
were just testing the deployment. Some of them flew further
(24:28):
away than expected, up to twenty miles away, and this
ended up threatening the project secrecy. So the testing team
had to go out knock on the doors, visit farmers
and say, hey, what with the military, can we look
in your attict and your barn and see if there
are any anything suspicious going up there? And after X
Files episode Waiting to Happen, it's like the cold open
(24:50):
is just like bats swarm all over the small town
and then Molder and Scullies show up and they're like,
why are there all these bats here? And it turns
out that they're weaponized by the US government. And you
already mentioned the burning air base, but the details are
crazy too, because this begins where they have all the
bats suited up. You know, they're they're they're perfectly explodable
and everything. Uh, and they say, hey, if somebody should
(25:10):
get a photo of this, So the army photogs move
in right and they're getting there, they're getting ready to
take some close ups, and then the bats are startled
by this. They wake up far faster than anticipated. They escape.
They run over to the nearby abandoned air base that
Carl's Bad Auxiliary Airfield, catch it on fire, and this
is a secret operation so they can't call in the
(25:31):
fire department to put it out, so they just have
to watch it burned. And one of the bats flies
under a general's car and and and then yeah, the
car explodes. Man. Uh, these poor bats, I mean, they're
providing us with some some humor now, but wow, that's unfortunate.
Although again I guess it's better than you know, it's
(25:53):
like the dog thing. It's better than being set on
fire at least it's quick. Yeah. And here's another detail,
and I got this from a book by on Him Kissler,
his book Animals in the Military from Animals elephants to
the dolphins of the U. S. Navy, and this goes
into not only weaponized animals, their general usage. So it's
a great book to point out. But he he mentions
(26:13):
that after the fires Shenanigan's, the army actually bailed and
the Navy took it over. And then this is where
it really becomes Operation x Ray as it's called. Navy
leases four caves that includes um Nay Cave, which contains
twenty to thirty million bats. So you're good to go.
They just just scoop them up, put him in the egg.
(26:36):
You don't have to train these bats either, is my understanding.
It's just put him in the egg, give him a
little backpack full of bombs, drop them. They do the rest. Yes,
they rely on their natural behavior. Ye. So, and that
it that sense. It seems a lot more sensible than
the dog thing. You're not having to manipulate its behavior
so much and not have to rewrite its behavior. You're
just saying, hey, their bats are gonna do what bat
to do and if they should happen to have a
(26:58):
little bit of napalm on them, well, hey, you know,
great dentists have come up with amazing ideas that have
pushed forward, as we learned, as we learned in our
episode on on tooth modification and extraction. They're they're they're
outside the box thinkers. So there's another animal that was
used in a situation kind of similar to this again
(27:20):
during World War Two. Again a sort of weird suggestion,
although this is from somebody who's a little bit more famous. Uh,
we're gonna talk about Project Pigeon or it was also
known as Project or Con and our guest star for
this is one B. F. Skinner Skinner Box. Yeah. Skinner
came up with this idea that you take train pigeons
(27:41):
and you would put them inside the nose cones on
the front of US missiles and the pigeons would guide
these missiles. Is before we had like missile targeting systems,
uh by tapping a target on a touch sensitive screen
that showed its destination. This is the part I don't understand.
I don't remember. It's not that I was alive, but
(28:01):
we had touch sensitive screens during world War two. I
don't remember this. It sounds like they have this pigeon
in a little room with an iPad. Well, I think
the screen here is likely, um, like the fabric screen. Oh,
because my one sources I was looking at referred to
neck movement, So I think maybe we're talking about fabric screens.
(28:22):
And then when the pigeons they're actually seeing what's in
front of the missile, it's not a projection of what
is in front of them, is I guess? Okay? But yeah,
this one's a little This one was a little harder
for me to wrap my head around. They train these
pigeons to peck at specific shapes that were you know,
high targets, so ships for instance, if you if the
(28:43):
pigeon packed on a ship, then they would be rewarded
with grain. Uh. And you know, we spent two million
on the bats, we only spent twenty five thousand on
the pigeon program. And again it was ultimately shelved in
nineteen the military wanted to use the funds instead to
focus on full developing radar. Yeah, and ultimately that's the
method that that plays out. Um. So that's kind of
(29:05):
Skinner's thing though, just as the answer to everything is like, yeah,
put it in a box. Now we're about to talk
about rats. I do want to mention real quick that
on Project x RAY with the exploding bats, yeah, at
one point some of the research team said, hey, let's
do this with rats too. Yeah. It's we've already developed
the the super small incendiary devices. Small step to move
(29:27):
forward to rats, right. Yeah, and instead of I'm assuming
that they would instead of opening the egg shaped container
in mid air, they would just let it land and
it would open and then the rats would run into
right or I guess they would be deployed some other way.
But apparently that suggestion was just completely ignored. I guess
they were like, no, I'm sorry, We're all in on bats.
We're not doing rats too. The head of the project
(29:48):
was Bruce Wayne, and he was just like, sorry, I
only do bats, no other animals. It's Project x RAY.
It's not gonna make sense if we do rats. Come on, Okay,
So we've done incendiary weaponization of animals, we've done explosive
weaponization of animals. We're gonna end with the biological weaponization
(30:08):
of animals. So what better animal to start with than
the rat? Right? So again. We turned to World War Two.
It's ninety two and the Soviets take disease bearing rats
and send them out against German troops in the Battle
of Stalingrad. So the story goes that they infected these
rats with tularemia, which is also known as rabbit fever.
(30:29):
It's a bacterial infection that causes weakness, fever, and skin ulcers.
Doesn't sound pleasant, right, So they spread this through contact
with the infected animal, in this case a rat, but
it can also be transmitted through respiration. So before the
Germans reached the Volga, fifty of the German soldiers who
had entered Soviet camps after Stalingrad had symptoms of this
(30:53):
disease of rabbit fever. And it's hypothesized that it was
because of this, uh you know, d I y hack
life hacks for the for World War two of infecting
these rats with the disease. Yeah. I was reading some
material on this from bioweapons former Soviet bioweapons researcher Ken Alabek,
who has written some fabulous stuff on bioweapons, and he
(31:15):
pointed out that so in ninety one, the Soviet Union
reported ten thousand cases of the illness. And it's during
that German siege of Stalingrad when it's apparently weaponized. And
we see the case of skyrocket to a hundred thousand,
and the way he laid it out, he made it sounded,
I mean, he strongly suggested. His argument was that, yes,
this had to have been a biological attack. And it's
(31:37):
also interesting that Alabec would go on to develop a
strain of vaccine resistant to laremia further Soviets before defecting
to the United States in nine well as with many
of the other examples that we have given already today, Uh,
this didn't quite work out so well, right, as with
the dogs, as with the bats, so it seems with
(31:57):
the disease also infected the Soviet It. Yeah, apparently it was.
It can be treated in a timely manner and everything.
Uh and and some people develop a life loan resistance
to it if they've been treated. So some of the
Germans had, you know, potentially already had it. They were
resistant to it because of that. But uh, subsequently other
Germans weren't passing along to one another after they got
(32:20):
it from the rats. Sunlight also kills it in thirty minutes,
as does antibiotics. So you know, there are a lot
of ways that the Germans could shake this off. But
then the rats apparently weren't, you know, just going at
the Germans, I'm sticking around this case. You see the
problem of depending on two biological agents in your biological
(32:40):
weapon program, both of which you're just you're trying to
manipulate how they behave, but they're both going to do
their thing. The rats going to do its thing and
the disease is going to do its thing. Yeah, exactly,
So we see something similar in which we try to
move this biological weaponization onto the next logical stage, right
(33:01):
from wraps to bugs. Uh. So, fleas were actually sprayed
with disease and dropped from low flying airplanes and bombs. Uh.
They also filled these bombs with a slurry of cholera bacteria.
This has supposedly been done by the Japanese against the Chinese,
and that they killed at least four hundred and forty
(33:24):
thousand Chinese with such a weapon. Yeah. And it seems
one of the things to keep in mind about these
essentially low tech vermin based attacks is that they're still
possible today. Um, most of the the major players in
biological weaponry or hopefully in many cases former players as
(33:45):
as some countries get out of the business. You know,
most of them are are experienced experimenting with more high
tech weaponized versions, such as use of aerosols, but you
still can potentially go back to these low tech vermin
based methods. Yeah, multiple articles that I read for this. Uh,
there wasn't any research saying that people were doing this,
but basically the insinuation was, well, if we're worried about
(34:08):
terrorism in present day society, this is one way that's
fairly easy for a terrorist to attack a large area. Right,
infect rats or insects with some kind of not lethal
but bad disease, it's going to really, you know, weaken
the population. So the US also did this with fleas. Uh.
(34:29):
There was the operation I love the names for these,
Operation x Ray, and then there must have been like
one person who just like came up with all the names.
He sat around all day coming up with this. The
name for this one was Operation big itch Um and
that's because they were using fleas again. Uh. They tested
it at Utah's dug Way Proving Ground in nineteen fifty four,
(34:52):
and what they did was that they placed a bunch
of guinea pigs in a six hundred and sixty yards
circular grid. Just this is how they detected the presence
of whether or not the fleas were working. They used
tropical rat fleas, uh, and they dropped them from bombs.
The bombs in this case we're designed to hold two
hundred thousand fleas each. And the test showed that the
(35:13):
fleas survived the drop and did attach themselves to the
hosts in this case, all of these guinea pigs that
are in this big circular grid. The downside was that
the canisters were opening in mid air and those aboard
the plane, including the pilot and the person operating you know,
the drop and everything, they were also getting bitten. So
they didn't infect these fleas with any diseases for this test.
(35:35):
This was just like, can we drop fleas in a
bomb and they'll actually get all over these guinea pigs
and potentially use them as a delivery system for another
exactly literal guinea pigs. This is not they actually used
guinea pigs. All right, Well, I think we covered all
the basic ways you can weaponize an animal. Yeah, I mean,
I'm sure that there are other examples out there or
(35:57):
rumors of examples, right, but these were the ones that
we could nailed down and find evidence for. If you
out there have some kind of reference that to something
we missed, especially something is like absolutely insane as the
bat bomb, we want to hear about it. Yeah, because
certainly there are a lot of other examples in history.
Like I was reading that Hannibal allegedly experimented with hurling
(36:19):
poisonous snakes onto enemy vessels. Yeah. Yeah, we talked in
the X Files episode Joe and I talked about using
bee hives as projectile weapons and hurling them at your enemies. Yeah.
And supposedly Byzantine emperor Leo the Wise, who ran from
eight eight six and nine twelve, he supposedly employed the
use of scorpions in a similar tactics that they like
(36:40):
fill like a launcher with scorpions and just fired them out.
I'm guessing like a basket of scorpions just lob into
the enemy ship. I mean, that's how basic, Like some
the weaponization of animals dizzles. Let's take is there a
dangerous animal, Let's get a lot of them and just
throw them at the enemy. Well, if you out there
have got more examples like this, scorpions, poisonous snakes, bee hives,
(37:02):
whatever we want to hear about it. The best ways
to get in touch with us are you can start
with social media. We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter, we're
on tumbler, all those we receive messages and we are
blow the mind on those. Uh and we don't just
you know, post our own stuff on social media as well.
Throughout the week, Robert, Joe and I are curating all
kinds of weird, bizarre science factoids that we're picking up
(37:24):
along our way as we do research for these episodes. Yeah,
whatever crosses our desk can find it there. And hey,
sometimes you can find hints of what we're gonna be covering.
Oh yeah, yeah, as in this case when I just
posted a weird illustration of a dog with bomb strapped
us back, some people actually guessed it cool. Well, hey,
and if you want to get in touch with us
the old fashioned way via the email, reach out to
(37:46):
us at below the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
Well more on this than path ands, weather topics, is It,
housetop Workshop, comm
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't it stuffed to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Saber.
Now you're all aware that we war is kind of
humanity's staying. It's our it's our big endeavor. It's wrapped
(00:26):
up in Uh most of our big technological gains were
great at it. Yeah, it's just ingrained in our culture
and we're not above, of course, inflicting war on the
environment as a whole, and also inviting our our fellow
animals and other members of the animal kingdom to participate
in our war at varying level, sometimes as weapons. Yeah.
(00:48):
In fact, throughout human history we've used animals. We've basically
seen them as being tools in the same way we
would see like a hammer or an axe or gun,
right in a way to extend human action in combat.
So today we're talking about weaponizing animals and how it's
been done and hypotheses on how it could be done.
(01:09):
The first place I want to go with this, though,
is and what inspired me to want to talk about
this is the another patron saint I think of Stuff
to Blow your mind, Grant Morrison's great work We Three,
which I've read, and I was surprised you hadn't. Yeah,
it's I've I've read a lot of Graham Morrison, but
I've never read that title. I've wanted to for years.
I think it's one of those that, since it's such
a short book, I was always hesitant to buy it
(01:32):
because it's I felt like, well, I'm I could get
more comic if I read this other great comic that
I haven't read yet. It's such a beautifully condensed story that,
even though it's only three issues long, uh, that you
get your bang for your buck with it. It's drawn
by Frank Quietly, who's worked with Morrison on a bunch
of other projects, and there's just amazing work with like
(01:53):
layering panels to tell the story. But the gist is
is it's sort of like the size sci fi. It's
extension of what we're going to talk about today. The U.
S Military takes a rabbit, a dog, and a cat
and mix them into cyborgs that wear exoskeletons so they
can use them on covert black ops. Uh. And they
(02:13):
send them to like kill like Mexican drug lords. Uh.
And then essentially the story is these these three animals
get out and they're on the run. All right, Yeah, well,
I definitely want to check it out at some point. Um. Now,
as we roll through these, uh, these examples and talk
about the history of of using animals as weapons, uh,
there's a lot we're gonna end up leaving out because
(02:35):
in the same way that so many human technologies are
tied in with war, our usage of animals is often
tied in with war. I mean, I mean take the
horse for example. The horse is a major Jane game
changer for war in human civilization and its earliest examples
it It gave raiders the ability to strike out across
long distances. And you can even look to its transformative effect,
(02:57):
particularly on a Native American ribes who you know who
managed to get buy for the longest without the horse.
Europeans bring the horse and you see tribes like the Comanche,
for instance, who were just just became a completely different culture,
became a horse centric cultural game change highly adept at
equestrian warfare in the aftermath of that introduction. Yeah, I mean,
(03:19):
we've used animals for all kinds of duties in warfare, right,
We used them for mounts as mounts such as horses
or elephants. Uh. We've used them for infiltration, rescue, retrieval.
I wrote um pieces for Stuff of Genius about how
ferrets have been trained to find minds in war uh,
and also to lake cable in particular wartime scenarios where
(03:40):
they're digging tunnels and things like that. So we've used
them for all of those. But in this particular episode,
we really want to hone in on how we've made
them into weapons themselves, right, where by either adding things
to them or basically rilling them up in a horrible
way to assault our enemies with. Yeah. So as we
roll into this first section, I'm actually going to read
a quote from the Bible, because this is uh. This
(04:02):
is a Biblical quote that always comes to mind when
the topic of weaponized animals comes up. All right, this
is from Judges fifteen four in it uh, and involves
Sampson that you know, sort of herculean figure of old Testament,
Samson with the hair, Yeah, yeah, Samson with the hair
the one. Yeah. He gets his hair eventually all shaved off.
(04:23):
He can't, he loses all his strength, but then he
grows it back and he pushes down some pillars, and
he's saying, in other cases he kills a thousand men
with a jaw bone of a donkey. He's like a superhero.
He's like the Bible superhero. Yeah, he's a he's a violent,
violent man um and in this particular instance, he's engaging
uh in the weaponization of animals. Says it goes like this.
(04:46):
Samson and said to them this time I shall be
blameless in regard to the Philistines when I do them harm.
Samson went and caught three hundred foxes and took torches
and turned the fox's tail to tail and put one
torch the middle between two tales. When he had set
fire to the torches, he released the foxes into the
standing grain of the Philistines, thus burning up both the
(05:09):
shocks and the standing grain, along with the vineyards and groves.
So this sounds kind of fantastic, right, It sounds like
a myth or is. And I don't know if if
if Sampson actually did this, or if somebody did do
this with foxes before, but our first piece of weaponized
animals in warfare is in fact using them as incendiary devices. So, uh,
(05:31):
whether it's done with foxes or not. I don't know,
but we've got war pigs. Uh. And uh, that's not
just a black Sabbath reference. Uh. In ancient Megara in
Greece in two hundred and fifty five BC, the city
was under attack from Macedonian conqueror Antigonus the second, and
the mcgarren's used a countermeasure by doing the same thing
(05:54):
that Sampson did, although a little bit more brutally. They
rounded up all their pigs, they doused them in pitch,
and then they set them on fire. Then they pushed
them out the city gates and outside the city this
is where the Macedonians had all their camps set up. Right,
So these terrified burning pigs are running around, and they
run into the camps and they set these tents on fire,
and then the Macedonians road war elephants, and the elephants
(06:17):
were terrified of these burning pigs, as you would be. Uh.
And the elephants subsequently lost total control and trampled a
number of the Macedonians. Now this is a ballsy move
for a besieged city. Say all right, we're gonna show them.
Let's take all these food animals we have here, and
let's just set them on fire and send them out. Yeah.
Maybe they just had a surplus of pigs that year.
(06:38):
I don't know. I mean they there was a gamble, right,
I guess they said, hey, we could keep these pigs
and eat them as we would continue to be. If
they won, they could still eat them, right Like, I
guess if there's just these burning pig corpses outside, they
could theoretically drag them back in the incentives for those
to go out to kill the dying. No one out
(06:59):
there would guess that I'm the vegetarian on something lay
or night. But yeah, So some accounts say that Antigonus
was so badly plagued by this particular strategy that he
actually started training his war elephants to mingle with pigs
on a regular basis so that they wouldn't be scared
of them, whether they were on fire or not. I
don't know if he actually like set pigs on fire
(07:21):
and had his animals hang out with these fire pigs. Yeah,
it's inexpensive too, uh. And this was done again later,
not with pigs, but with camels. A thousand years later,
the Tuco Mongol leader Teamore was said to have used
flaming camels against Indian elephants in warfare. So the same
thing he said, a bunch of camels on fire and
(07:42):
sent them on their way against these elephants. I'm imagining,
like I think, like most people, if they don't immediately
go to the Hannibal elephant story, which we're gonna get into,
they think of Lord of the Rings and those giant
elephants that they're writing in that, And I'm wondering why
the elves just didn't set a bunch of pigs on
fire and Lord of the rigs and send them on
their way towards those what do they call those elephants?
(08:04):
They were like they were like elephants variation of elephant.
It was like, yeah, like some kind of dire elephant
masted on type of thing. Yeah, okay, uh, fun little
aside here, I'm talking about weaponizing a camel um And
granted this involves essentially the use of a camel as
a mount, but then also as a weapons platform. Uh.
(08:25):
The There's this a Turkish tradition of the Zemburic, which
is essentially camel mounted weaponry. The earliest examples are you
have a crossbow that's mounted on the saddle, then you
have powdered guns, and then eventually this evolves to feature
rapid fire gatling guns that are mounted on a swivel. Now,
you didn't fire this while the camel was standing, but
(08:48):
what you would do is you would get the animal
to kneel and then you would fasten each leg to
accord to keep it from moving because you're about to
fire at gatling gun on its back. And I think
the average camel might be a little bit spooked by that.
That sounds like the kind of thing that would fit
in really well and like a D and D campaign.
Like you've got your proficiency with mounted animals and then
(09:11):
you add your proficiency with like arranged weapons to that.
Mount your mount your gatling gun on a dragon or something. Yeah,
and if you want to see a picture of one
of these, I'll include a link to a post I
did about this on the landing page for this episode.
So the incendiary animals doesn't end there either. We've got
monkeys doing this in China and not to themselves, yand you.
(09:32):
Rebels in China apparently attacked the Song dynasty in the
twelfth century, So the imperial army, not the rebels. The
army lit a bunch of monkeys on fire and unleashed
them into the ends you camp presumably would you know,
to burn down their tents had caused general terror to
just run around and young and spread fire. I've also
read that during the Opium War in the mid nineteenth
(09:54):
century that the Chinese were, you know, trying to destroy
damage the English ships. Uh. And they start by looking
into using fire rafts, and they actually went forward with
a plan to send fireworks laden monkeys onto the boats. Uh.
And to the point that they actually acquired the monkeys
move them to an advanced base. But then some defeats
(10:15):
pushed the initiative back and nothing never came of it.
But they had the monkeys, they were ready to do it.
This is gonna be a common theme in today's episode
that we've experimented with using animals as weapons a lot,
and then just before we're about to do it, we
back off and we say, wait, we figured out something
else that's even worse that doesn't involve animals. Yeah, because
time and time again, it seems like a simple fix.
(10:36):
It seems like it's just as simple as Samson saying
that Samson saying, Hey, I'm gonna burn them down. I'm
gonna just light some fire on the back of these
foxes and send them on. But then you have to
do all of these steps. You have to do training,
you have to work in the technology, and eventually there
is a better, more simple and dependable method out there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
especially with modern technology. It's really kind of caps off
(10:56):
around World War Two, which is where we're gonna go next.
So you get used to setting animals on fire and
sending them out your enemies, what's the next step strapping
bombs to them and sending them out your enemies. So
a lot of you out there have probably heard of this.
This is the most common example that's brought up with
the weaponization of animals. But if you haven't, we're going
to talk about anti tank dogs. Now. This is during
(11:17):
World War Two. The Soviet Army UH was training dogs
beginning in nineteen thirties, so actually just before they gotten
into major battles with Germany, they were training them to
carry explosives towards wide range targets, then released the bomb
and then run away, and then they would have like
a remote detonator for the bomb. What this evolved into
(11:38):
was in nineteen forty one, they started training the dogs
by hiding food on the undersides of tanks, and they
would underfeed these dogs so they be malnourished dogs who
are looking for food. They basically teach them the place
to find food is under tanks. Uh, And then they
would strap ten to twelve kims of high explosives and
four pouches to these dogs like in a little backpack.
(12:00):
In fact, recently on social media kind of teased our
audience with what we're gonna be talking about today by
posting an illustration of this from from the time We've
landed a very lighthearted place here. Um, starved dogs that
are laden with explosives. It gets worse. They've been a
spring loaded trigger sticking up on their back. Right. So
the the idea here is they train these dogs ago
(12:21):
looking for food under tanks. They sent them off towards
the Germans. The dogs crawl under German tanks and then
when they stand up to look for the food, they
pushed the pin into the bottom of the tank. Boom
goes the explosives and kills the dog. Right. Uh. You know,
I guess this is better than setting the dogs on
fire because it's pretty instantaneous death. But it's still pretty horrific. Unfortunately,
(12:43):
it didn't quite work out for the Russians as they planned,
because German tanks use petrol and Russian tanks used diesel.
So what would happen was the dogs would you know,
they've they're operating more on their sense of smell when
they're looking for something to eat, so they would end
up heating act to where they came from smelling the diesel.
They would also run away because of the loud noises
(13:05):
of gunshots and explosions during battle, so they would often
either end up under Soviet tanks or they would dive
into Soviet trenches and then explode. So okay. The Germans
also caught wind of this from capturing some prisoners, and
during interrogation, the prisoners were like, yeah, we're training dogs
and strapping bombs to their backs and uh. So the
Germans had a policy at this point they would just
(13:27):
shoot any dogs on site. Once they learned this, so
any dogs that they came in contact with they would
just immediately shoot them from far away. Uh And then
earlier there were border skirmishes with Japan in which Russia
sent mine carrying dogs. They tried to train them to
open the hatches on the top of tanks and then
drop the minds in that would explode. Apparently these mines
(13:48):
were somehow set to explode in proximity to metal, so
the metal of the tanks would would would make the
minds explode then too. So the idea here is when
strapping explosives to a dog make the task is complicated,
it is possible. Oh yeah, you can make it even worse.
The Japan also used dogs in World War Two, but
instead of giving them little backpacks, they would strap little
(14:08):
carts to them that they pulled behind them that were
filled with fifty pounds of explosives, and they would detonate
those remotely. And my impression was, this isn't the situation
where they would let the dogs deliver the goods and
then come back. They blew the dogs up as well.
They reportedly used this when Japan attacked Malaysia and Hong Kong. Uh.
And then we in the US also tested this. Uh.
(14:31):
We tested it with time bombs though uh. What ended
up happening was the dogs would end up running back,
similar to the Soviet situation. They'd run back to their owners.
They never actually made it into battle, and it was
just deemed inefficient. Yeah, they're the US uh briefly flirted
with the use of explosive dogs. Um. They even started
a trial program at Virginia's uh Fort Belvoir in nineteen three. Uh.
(14:55):
They they labeled them demolition wolves, which is interesting because
the American affinity for dogs. I feel like they they
had to just linguistically take a step back from that
and say, oh, well, they're not bomb dogs, they're uh,
they're Timolian wolves. Yeah. So, but they were looking at
working on using them as bunker busters. So the aim
(15:15):
here was to train them to enter Japanese tunnels and
fortifications while wearing twenty pounds of explosives either timed or
remotely detonated by a three d foot electrical wire. So,
as you mentioned, one of the problems dog or wolf
is trailing behind electrical wire. Who just to keep it simple. Now,
as as you mentioned one of the problems, it was
(15:37):
always worried that the dog would return to the friendlies,
returned to the U. S. Marines and explode, or that
donated dogs would be hard to come by when it
became known that this is what the military was using
them for. Yeah, and and so this gets kind to
kind of the heart of why I think we don't
see this as much in present day as because it's
just kind of considered barbaric and unethical actually with you know, dogs,
(16:01):
which are sort of man's best friend, right, and then
that that would be the last animal that we would
want to do this with. Although you know, uh, there's
you We're we're not going to specifically hone in on this,
but the dolphin usage in wartime has been rumored to
have been we should, uh imply that the conspiracy guys
(16:22):
should do an episode on dolphin weaponization because as far
as I could find, there's no evidence that dolphins are
actually weaponized. They are used by the military, uh for
for you know, research missions or you know, finding minds
or rescue operations, but there's no actual evidence in the
military denies every time somebody says, oh yeah, you're strapping
(16:44):
like missile launchers to to dolphin backs. Now, not too
long after this whole demolition wolves the scenario, the US
also experimented with dogs his mind detectors, um, and this
is up being something we do to this day. The
US military still uses bomb dogs. You know, we're talking
highly trained explosive sniffing animals, but at the time this
(17:05):
was a rougher procedure. In the training, they found that
of the minds were discovered by the dogs, the dogs
were actually really good at sniffing off the minds, but
they also didn't want the dogs detonating the minds, so
they tried to train them to fear the minds, and
this made up most of the dogs been afraid of
all metal objects, including their own food bowls, to the
(17:27):
point where only six of these dogs were ever actually
sent into combat. Only six were able to to to
exit training um with with the correct level of fear
regarding metal objects. Well, you know, I'm in the middle
of training a new dog right now. I I can sympathize.
I'm having trouble just getting our new dog to walk
up and downstairs. What's a complicated thing, right, manipulating another
(17:48):
organism's behavior, like knowing how it is evolved to behave
and then warping that to your own benefit. Be it
just the benefit of living calmly in a house or
dealing with explode. Yeah, it's sort of teaching them what
the rules of the world are is a lot more
difficult than we would think that it would be. Uh. So, yeah,
(18:08):
we mentioned there's Hannibal's elephants. Those were notoriously used in
military operation. Uh, there's the dolphins that I talked about before.
We've got to get to John C. Lily. We keep
talking about this, but somebody just asked me about on
social media if we were going to do something around
telepathy and dolphins, and I thought, we just gotta we
(18:29):
gotta dive right into that John C. Lily episode. Yeah,
we need to order some books and then move forward.
But yeah, I mean dogs are still used today as
recently as in two thousand five, there was a dog's
suicide bomb that was reported in Cokirk by bomber in Iraq.
The dog was killed, but no humans were hurt in
that scenario. So people are still strapping bombs to dogs.
(18:51):
And fortunately that we have other explosive sniffing animals like
I was talking about with those ferrets that are particularly
good at seeking out minds. I believe there I've been
some excellent projects involving rats as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Alright,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
more weaponized animals. Alright, we're back. So one of the
(19:19):
most insane stories that I came across when we were
researching this involved bats. Same idea. Strap some explosives or
in this case they are incendiary devices to bats and
then drop them on your enemy. And it's crazy because
it seems like the one of the last animals you
would choose, right, But apparently it was rather efficient. So
(19:41):
this was his idea. Okay, Robert, you take the bats
and you put them into an egg shaped container and
you drop them over your target. It's like a bomb
full of bats. Yeah. Uh. And it's it's got a
parachute and it opens right so at the level, so
the bats can fly off and they can go and
land and hide and addicts and barns and homes all
(20:03):
the kinds of places that bats normally go to. Right.
They're searching for, you know, tight enclosed, dark spaces. Uh.
And then these bats have these explosives on them that
are radio controlled and we set them off remotely. We
actually prototyped this. So this was his idea that he
just wrote in a letter. Can imagine like today, like
I write to Barack Obama and I say, I got
(20:26):
an idea. What if we strap bombs to bats? You know,
like that would just immediately go in the junk pile
finish the letter, right, yeah, exactly, but no, at that time,
not only did they read it, but they went this
is a pretty good idea and then put it into uh,
put it into prototype, so that they in the nineteen forties,
(20:47):
the U. S. Government actually tested this. They accidentally set
an Air Force base in Carl's Bad, New Mexico on
fire testing with bats. So this task involved basically two
teams here and this is where you can really imagine
the mini series unfolding, right. So one involved a few
men who had to scout cave throughout the American Southwest
(21:09):
to find both the variety of bat that that they
could use and a place where they could be captured
in the necessary quantities. So you have to hit that
sweet spot, right. It needs to be something you can
strap explosives to, but it needs to be something you
can find in large enough amounts. It needs to be
something that you can handle, that you can feed, that
(21:30):
you can store. And that's why they end up deciding
on this Mexican freetail bat. Alright, so we've got the bats,
We've got an egg shaped container form, right, how do
we strap these tiny little bombs to the and this
this is the other area where it gets crazy, right,
because because each of what they come up with is
basically a marvel of explosive engineering. We're talking one ounce bombs.
(21:55):
Each one is an oblong uh nitro cellulose case filled
with thickened kerostene essentially napalm and a delayed action timer,
and when ignited, the capsule produces a two foot long
flame for eight solid minutes. Geez yeah, okay, yeah, so
it's not like a little so much more than I
(22:18):
expected that when I was initially reading about this. Yeah,
I mean they engineered the heck out of this problem.
They said, oh, you want to you want a bat
to explode, Well, we're gonna make it as explosive as
humanly POSSI. This is like the kind of like steampunk
weaponry that I can imagine in like some kind of
video game nowadays, like a BioShock or something like that,
Like you now have the power to send out a
(22:39):
swarm of bats that are covered in explosive Yeah, I
guess it would be. You could think of it as
like what animal punk or something. I don't know. There's
gonna be a whole new literature genre based around this.
So yeah, the Marines tested this. They built a mock
up of a Japanese city and they dropped the bats
on it, and the test was deemed a success. They
spent two million dollars on testing this project, and then
(23:03):
they canceled it. And the reason why was they felt
the the U. S. Government felt that it was moving
along too slowly, so they moved all of those resources
into focusing on the atom bomb uh and, which we
now know was used and and and was fairly successful. Adams,
the guy who came up with this idea and wrote
the letter initially, was later interviewed and he reportedly said
(23:26):
that his bat bomb plan would have caused much as
much structural damage as an A bomb, but there wouldn't
have been as much loss of life. So he wished
that they had stuck with the bat bomb plan rather
than moving into atomic weaponry. It's still amazingly that we
ended up spending millions of dollars on it, though, And
I have a few other tidbits here from just the
(23:46):
kind of wackiness of this whole endeavor. So the idea
for deployment was that they would keep the bats in
cool hibernation in that big egg bombay and then they'd
wake up when the bomb containing them opened at the
appropriate altitude. But in the test, many of the bats
died when they didn't wake up before ground impact. They're
just landing. That was something I was wondering about. Two
(24:07):
is like how they're packed in there right, because I'm picturing, like,
you know, bats like to hang from things. Do they
just like stuff this thing until it was full of
a thousand bats, but you know they have like little
I don't know, compartments for each bat. Yeah. And then
and then in the test too, and I'm presuming that
they were not laden with explosives at this point, they
were just testing the deployment. Some of them flew further
(24:28):
away than expected, up to twenty miles away, and this
ended up threatening the project secrecy. So the testing team
had to go out knock on the doors, visit farmers
and say, hey, what with the military, can we look
in your attict and your barn and see if there
are any anything suspicious going up there? And after X
Files episode Waiting to Happen, it's like the cold open
(24:50):
is just like bats swarm all over the small town
and then Molder and Scullies show up and they're like,
why are there all these bats here? And it turns
out that they're weaponized by the US government. And you
already mentioned the burning air base, but the details are
crazy too, because this begins where they have all the
bats suited up. You know, they're they're they're perfectly explodable
and everything. Uh, and they say, hey, if somebody should
(25:10):
get a photo of this, So the army photogs move
in right and they're getting there, they're getting ready to
take some close ups, and then the bats are startled
by this. They wake up far faster than anticipated. They escape.
They run over to the nearby abandoned air base that
Carl's Bad Auxiliary Airfield, catch it on fire, and this
is a secret operation so they can't call in the
(25:31):
fire department to put it out, so they just have
to watch it burned. And one of the bats flies
under a general's car and and and then yeah, the
car explodes. Man. Uh, these poor bats, I mean, they're
providing us with some some humor now, but wow, that's unfortunate.
Although again I guess it's better than you know, it's
(25:53):
like the dog thing. It's better than being set on
fire at least it's quick. Yeah. And here's another detail,
and I got this from a book by on Him Kissler,
his book Animals in the Military from Animals elephants to
the dolphins of the U. S. Navy, and this goes
into not only weaponized animals, their general usage. So it's
a great book to point out. But he he mentions
(26:13):
that after the fires Shenanigan's, the army actually bailed and
the Navy took it over. And then this is where
it really becomes Operation x Ray as it's called. Navy
leases four caves that includes um Nay Cave, which contains
twenty to thirty million bats. So you're good to go.
They just just scoop them up, put him in the egg.
(26:36):
You don't have to train these bats either, is my understanding.
It's just put him in the egg, give him a
little backpack full of bombs, drop them. They do the rest. Yes,
they rely on their natural behavior. Ye. So, and that
it that sense. It seems a lot more sensible than
the dog thing. You're not having to manipulate its behavior
so much and not have to rewrite its behavior. You're
just saying, hey, their bats are gonna do what bat
to do and if they should happen to have a
(26:58):
little bit of napalm on them, well, hey, you know,
great dentists have come up with amazing ideas that have
pushed forward, as we learned, as we learned in our
episode on on tooth modification and extraction. They're they're they're
outside the box thinkers. So there's another animal that was
used in a situation kind of similar to this again
(27:20):
during World War Two. Again a sort of weird suggestion,
although this is from somebody who's a little bit more famous. Uh,
we're gonna talk about Project Pigeon or it was also
known as Project or Con and our guest star for
this is one B. F. Skinner Skinner Box. Yeah. Skinner
came up with this idea that you take train pigeons
(27:41):
and you would put them inside the nose cones on
the front of US missiles and the pigeons would guide
these missiles. Is before we had like missile targeting systems,
uh by tapping a target on a touch sensitive screen
that showed its destination. This is the part I don't understand.
I don't remember. It's not that I was alive, but
(28:01):
we had touch sensitive screens during world War two. I
don't remember this. It sounds like they have this pigeon
in a little room with an iPad. Well, I think
the screen here is likely, um, like the fabric screen. Oh,
because my one sources I was looking at referred to
neck movement, So I think maybe we're talking about fabric screens.
(28:22):
And then when the pigeons they're actually seeing what's in
front of the missile, it's not a projection of what
is in front of them, is I guess? Okay? But yeah,
this one's a little This one was a little harder
for me to wrap my head around. They train these
pigeons to peck at specific shapes that were you know,
high targets, so ships for instance, if you if the
(28:43):
pigeon packed on a ship, then they would be rewarded
with grain. Uh. And you know, we spent two million
on the bats, we only spent twenty five thousand on
the pigeon program. And again it was ultimately shelved in
nineteen the military wanted to use the funds instead to
focus on full developing radar. Yeah, and ultimately that's the
method that that plays out. Um. So that's kind of
(29:05):
Skinner's thing though, just as the answer to everything is like, yeah,
put it in a box. Now we're about to talk
about rats. I do want to mention real quick that
on Project x RAY with the exploding bats, yeah, at
one point some of the research team said, hey, let's
do this with rats too. Yeah. It's we've already developed
the the super small incendiary devices. Small step to move
(29:27):
forward to rats, right. Yeah, and instead of I'm assuming
that they would instead of opening the egg shaped container
in mid air, they would just let it land and
it would open and then the rats would run into
right or I guess they would be deployed some other way.
But apparently that suggestion was just completely ignored. I guess
they were like, no, I'm sorry, We're all in on bats.
We're not doing rats too. The head of the project
(29:48):
was Bruce Wayne, and he was just like, sorry, I
only do bats, no other animals. It's Project x RAY.
It's not gonna make sense if we do rats. Come on, Okay,
So we've done incendiary weaponization of animals, we've done explosive
weaponization of animals. We're gonna end with the biological weaponization
(30:08):
of animals. So what better animal to start with than
the rat? Right? So again. We turned to World War Two.
It's ninety two and the Soviets take disease bearing rats
and send them out against German troops in the Battle
of Stalingrad. So the story goes that they infected these
rats with tularemia, which is also known as rabbit fever.
(30:29):
It's a bacterial infection that causes weakness, fever, and skin ulcers.
Doesn't sound pleasant, right, So they spread this through contact
with the infected animal, in this case a rat, but
it can also be transmitted through respiration. So before the
Germans reached the Volga, fifty of the German soldiers who
had entered Soviet camps after Stalingrad had symptoms of this
(30:53):
disease of rabbit fever. And it's hypothesized that it was
because of this, uh you know, d I y hack
life hacks for the for World War two of infecting
these rats with the disease. Yeah. I was reading some
material on this from bioweapons former Soviet bioweapons researcher Ken Alabek,
who has written some fabulous stuff on bioweapons, and he
(31:15):
pointed out that so in ninety one, the Soviet Union
reported ten thousand cases of the illness. And it's during
that German siege of Stalingrad when it's apparently weaponized. And
we see the case of skyrocket to a hundred thousand,
and the way he laid it out, he made it sounded,
I mean, he strongly suggested. His argument was that, yes,
this had to have been a biological attack. And it's
(31:37):
also interesting that Alabec would go on to develop a
strain of vaccine resistant to laremia further Soviets before defecting
to the United States in nine well as with many
of the other examples that we have given already today, Uh,
this didn't quite work out so well, right, as with
the dogs, as with the bats, so it seems with
(31:57):
the disease also infected the Soviet It. Yeah, apparently it was.
It can be treated in a timely manner and everything.
Uh and and some people develop a life loan resistance
to it if they've been treated. So some of the
Germans had, you know, potentially already had it. They were
resistant to it because of that. But uh, subsequently other
Germans weren't passing along to one another after they got
(32:20):
it from the rats. Sunlight also kills it in thirty minutes,
as does antibiotics. So you know, there are a lot
of ways that the Germans could shake this off. But
then the rats apparently weren't, you know, just going at
the Germans, I'm sticking around this case. You see the
problem of depending on two biological agents in your biological
(32:40):
weapon program, both of which you're just you're trying to
manipulate how they behave, but they're both going to do
their thing. The rats going to do its thing and
the disease is going to do its thing. Yeah, exactly,
So we see something similar in which we try to
move this biological weaponization onto the next logical stage, right
(33:01):
from wraps to bugs. Uh. So, fleas were actually sprayed
with disease and dropped from low flying airplanes and bombs. Uh.
They also filled these bombs with a slurry of cholera bacteria.
This has supposedly been done by the Japanese against the Chinese,
and that they killed at least four hundred and forty
(33:24):
thousand Chinese with such a weapon. Yeah. And it seems
one of the things to keep in mind about these
essentially low tech vermin based attacks is that they're still
possible today. Um, most of the the major players in
biological weaponry or hopefully in many cases former players as
(33:45):
as some countries get out of the business. You know,
most of them are are experienced experimenting with more high
tech weaponized versions, such as use of aerosols, but you
still can potentially go back to these low tech vermin
based methods. Yeah, multiple articles that I read for this. Uh,
there wasn't any research saying that people were doing this,
but basically the insinuation was, well, if we're worried about
(34:08):
terrorism in present day society, this is one way that's
fairly easy for a terrorist to attack a large area. Right,
infect rats or insects with some kind of not lethal
but bad disease, it's going to really, you know, weaken
the population. So the US also did this with fleas. Uh.
(34:29):
There was the operation I love the names for these,
Operation x Ray, and then there must have been like
one person who just like came up with all the names.
He sat around all day coming up with this. The
name for this one was Operation big itch Um and
that's because they were using fleas again. Uh. They tested
it at Utah's dug Way Proving Ground in nineteen fifty four,
(34:52):
and what they did was that they placed a bunch
of guinea pigs in a six hundred and sixty yards
circular grid. Just this is how they detected the presence
of whether or not the fleas were working. They used
tropical rat fleas, uh, and they dropped them from bombs.
The bombs in this case we're designed to hold two
hundred thousand fleas each. And the test showed that the
(35:13):
fleas survived the drop and did attach themselves to the
hosts in this case, all of these guinea pigs that
are in this big circular grid. The downside was that
the canisters were opening in mid air and those aboard
the plane, including the pilot and the person operating you know,
the drop and everything, they were also getting bitten. So
they didn't infect these fleas with any diseases for this test.
(35:35):
This was just like, can we drop fleas in a
bomb and they'll actually get all over these guinea pigs
and potentially use them as a delivery system for another
exactly literal guinea pigs. This is not they actually used
guinea pigs. All right, Well, I think we covered all
the basic ways you can weaponize an animal. Yeah, I mean,
I'm sure that there are other examples out there or
(35:57):
rumors of examples, right, but these were the ones that
we could nailed down and find evidence for. If you
out there have some kind of reference that to something
we missed, especially something is like absolutely insane as the
bat bomb, we want to hear about it. Yeah, because
certainly there are a lot of other examples in history.
Like I was reading that Hannibal allegedly experimented with hurling
(36:19):
poisonous snakes onto enemy vessels. Yeah. Yeah, we talked in
the X Files episode Joe and I talked about using
bee hives as projectile weapons and hurling them at your enemies. Yeah.
And supposedly Byzantine emperor Leo the Wise, who ran from
eight eight six and nine twelve, he supposedly employed the
use of scorpions in a similar tactics that they like
(36:40):
fill like a launcher with scorpions and just fired them out.
I'm guessing like a basket of scorpions just lob into
the enemy ship. I mean, that's how basic, Like some
the weaponization of animals dizzles. Let's take is there a
dangerous animal, Let's get a lot of them and just
throw them at the enemy. Well, if you out there
have got more examples like this, scorpions, poisonous snakes, bee hives,
(37:02):
whatever we want to hear about it. The best ways
to get in touch with us are you can start
with social media. We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter, we're
on tumbler, all those we receive messages and we are
blow the mind on those. Uh and we don't just
you know, post our own stuff on social media as well.
Throughout the week, Robert, Joe and I are curating all
kinds of weird, bizarre science factoids that we're picking up
(37:24):
along our way as we do research for these episodes. Yeah,
whatever crosses our desk can find it there. And hey,
sometimes you can find hints of what we're gonna be covering.
Oh yeah, yeah, as in this case when I just
posted a weird illustration of a dog with bomb strapped
us back, some people actually guessed it cool. Well, hey,
and if you want to get in touch with us
the old fashioned way via the email, reach out to
(37:46):
us at below the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
Well more on this than path ands, weather topics, is It,
housetop Workshop, comm
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.