The Sometimes-Effective Use of Animals as Unwitting Weapons Throughout History

The video above depicts a shitty thing that hit the internet this week. For whatever reason, a lady is arguing with some other ladies in the street. When things get heated, she turns her very small dog on a leash into a mace-and-chain (or a "flail"), and swings it at one of her adversaries. If fashioning a weapon from your dog weren't a monstrous thing to do, I'd say the the blow connects nicely, and the second woman is kept at bay. Instead, I'll say the dog in the video is potentially injured in a collision with a woman's shoulder and face (Worth noting: The dog's suffering appears to continue as the woman hurries away with the dog in a painful-looking dangling position).

Normally this is not the kind of thing that really needs extra coverage on our respectable website, but this showed up twice in the media last week. In addition to the dog-leash-swinger above, there was a guy in Kansas who weaponized his dog in almost the exact same way, though not as effectively: He swung his Pekingese at a cop, who then tasered and arrested him. Park City, Kansas Police Chief Phil Bostain, told the local NBC news affiliate, "Everyone sees this little dog that's defenseless. This dog's not here by its own choice, and it's used as a weapon. It's disturbing."

It's a bit ironic that a police officer would complain about a dog being "used as a weapon," when over the decades police have weaponized dogs too, famously using them to squelch protests during the Civil Rights Movement. But let's not be so dense as to miss his point. Yes, animals have been used in war, law enforcement and hunting since the dawn of humanity, but typically those animals are agents in their own weaponization. You can argue whether or not police dogs consent to become weapons—a worthy argument for another time. But what's even disturbing to a cop is when animals are used as blunt instruments or ammunition. Although finding ways to take advantage of animals' aggressive behaviors has served humans well over the years, using them as unwitting bullets, bombs and bludgeons has been prevalent throughout human history too.

Sure, millions of animals have charged into battle with soldiers on their backs through the millennia. It must be terrifying to be a horse when the battle doesn't go well, and it can only be annoying at best when the asshole on your back is winning. But throughout most of history—and maybe still today—people have used animals the way modern belligerents might use missiles and bombs.

Pliny the Elder described what is perhaps the first instance of incendiary animals: Pigs. In Pliny the Elder's account it sounds as though they were just unleashed to scare war elephants. Supposedly once scared, Elephants "fall back, and become no less formidable for the destruction which they deal to their own side, than to their opponents." That puts pigs in that semi-willing participant category, along with war elephants and, for that matter, horses. But some historians think war pigs were set on fire, making them less like sentient fighter jets, and more like sentient kamikaze planes.

There's actually substantial evidence that one of Alexander the Great's generals Antigonus was so severely plagued by the popular flaming pig strategy that he forced his war elephants to mingle with pigs full time so that they wouldn't be afraid of pigs—flaming or otherwise. Over a thousand years later, a very similar strategy was employed by the Tuko-Mongol Genghis Khan imitator Timur who used flaming camels against Elephants in India.

As the centuries wore on and battle situations became more prickly and complicated, so did biological warfare. Early examples include the maritime strategy practiced by Hannibal, Carthage's legendary wartime tactician, in 190 BC-ish of throwing poisonous snakes into enemy ships —although deadly snakebites were the theoretical lethal payload, not just the sheer force of a snake smacking into a sailor. Centuries later in the middle ages, Byzantine Emperor Leo the Wise was known for lobbing scorpion bombs, with a strategy similar to that of Hannibal and his snakes.

Not long after those scorpion bombs were used, a great example of an unwittingly weaponized animal materialized on the other side of the world in China: flaming monkeys. Monkeys were essentially used the way the US military used napalm in Vietnam. When Yanzhou rebels tried to take on the newly-minted Song Dynasty around the early 12th Century, the Imperial army lit monkeys on fire, and unleashed them in the Yanzhou rebel camp. Non-flaming monkeys aren't exactly known for keeping their shit together, so flaming monkeys sound pretty terrifying.

More recent developments in war, like bombs that don't explode until they hit their target, and missiles that can be aimed, have made military strategists greedy about what kind of results they should expect from their animal weapons. That's been good in some ways, because a lot of unwitting animal weapons have been aborted when they were still in the research phase. And it's also resulted in some really depressing weapons.

In the 1930s, when Japan and Russia had a series of border skirmishes, Russia convinced a fighting force of mine-carrying dogs that all open hatches—like the ones on the tops of tanks—had delicious food inside them. Then of course the trainers starved the dogs right before a battle, making them eager to find a target. It's easy to imagine a hungry dog's disappointment when it didn't find any food, but the dogs probably didn't get a chance to be disappointed; the mines were wired to explode when a magnetic trigger was set off by proximity to a metal tank.

Imperial Japan later copied the strategy when its pal Nazi Germany sent Japan thousands of war dogs during World War II. The dogs were strapped to sad little carts (thankfully, I couldn't find a photo) with 50 pounds of explosives in them, which could be detonated remotely. This strategy was reportedly used in Japan's Malay and Hong Kong incursions during World War II.

Not to be outdone for sheer horribleness, the United States tested out time bombs attached to dogs, but that didn't go so great; the dogs kept returning to their owners. The technology never made it to the battlefield. The military later claimed that during testing, no dog was ever attached to an actual bomb, although there was talk in the 1950s of nuclear bomb-carrying dogs. But then again, in the 1950s, the US thought about sticking nuclear bombs everywhere.

But back to World War II, when the US was trying to figure out more efficient ways to firebomb Japan, the supervillains in charge of the US military almost unleashed the most chilling form of airborne death ever conceived by humans: bat bombs. Bat bombs were bomb casings filled with thousands of bats, and each bat was carrying its own little radio controlled explosive, which looked like a bat strapped to a cartoon bundle of TNT. Bat bombs were meant to be dropped on major Japanese cities in the millions, quietly dispersing bombs into every nook and cranny (plus presumably some caves and trees). Then when they were detonated, they would have lit the whole city on fire at once. Tests did get as far as the actually-blowing-up-bats phase, and the little guys ended up lighting a military base on fire. Bat bomb mastermind Dr. Lytle Adams later regretted that bat bomb research was abandoned in favor of nuclear bomb research, saying that with bat bombs "Japan could have been devastated, yet with small loss of life."

Attaching bombs to animals seems to have peaked in World War II, but they've allegedly been used by insurgents in Iraq as recently as ten years ago. In 2005, a dog suicide bomb was reported by Iraqi police in Kirkuk. No humans were hurt, and the police statement about the incident was kind of pointed and shamey. "The dog was torn apart by the explosion which caused neither injury among the soldiers nor any damage," police chief Mohammed Barzaji told The Telegraph.

Prior to the 1990s, news archive searches don't turn up many stories of people swinging or throwing animals at others. It's a relatively new phenomenon—the stories I mean, probably not the use of animals to whack people with. There's very little to go off of in building a case that attitudes have changed, although Alfred Hitchcock's horrible treatment of the eponymous birds during the making of The Birds makes for good anecdotal evidence. According to Birds leading lady Tippi Hedren, the birds were being treated like, well, weapons:

Unsettling offbeat news stories began—as far as I can tell—around 1996 in Scotland, when a drunk sports fan on a bus chucked his Jack Russell terrier at a fan of an opposing team. It sounds a bit like something out of Trainspotting, which came out that same year.

There's a definite profile, like the guy last week in Kansas, they're often wasted or mentally ill, and they're out somewhere with their small, fully grown dog. Then for whatever reason, they get angry at the cops. This shows up again and again and again. In one case in 2011, a guy got mad at the cops and threw a rottweiler puppy, which, at 47 pounds, wasn't so small. In 2013, a lady in Florida reportedly threw a cat at police.

When law enforcement isn't involved, the fickle human heart often is. In 2009, a Project Runway star threw a cat at her boyfriend, according to TMZ. In 2010, a guy in Florida threw his dog at his wife, before threatening to kill her. The tales of romance gone awry just go on and on.

Rarely does an animal-throwing incident involve neither cops nor a broken heart, but there was a time last year when someone threw a snake at a Tim Horton's clerk for refusing to dice some onions. This has been covered before at VICE.

When the condition of the animal makes it into the report, they're usually shaken up, but OK.

But this year has seen a real glut of these stories, and they've taken a turn for the disturbing. There were the two cases last week, of course, in which it doesn't appear that the dogs were seriously injured. Earlier this year, a guy in Kalamazoo, Michigan named Timothy Tucker was convicted of using a puppy to severely beat his girlfriend in late 2014. The human victim suffered a black eye, but the puppy died. Then in April, a guy in Eugene, Oregon named Joshua Horn allegedly chucked his dog at a cop, who then took out his gun and fatally shot the dog.

That brings us pretty much up to date. Here in 2015, we humans have a problem, and that problem is we keep bashing each other with animals. It's not good for the animals, and it's not good for the humans. Granted, this is far from the biggest problem we have as a species, but knocking this shit off is probably a lot easier than fixing climate change.

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