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