War Pigs: I

It sounds like myth: the stories and rumors and half-remembered newspaper fragments:

• Westerfeld's "Leviathan" features animals, like airwhales, that were modified for war.
• A friend from Amityville (yes, that Amityville) tells tales of a top secret lab near Long Island that supposedly has 20 foot tall cows (presumably, these rumors spring from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center).
• I swear to scoffers that I recall a snippet from the news: A mother lets baby cry itself to sleep--the Ferber method to teach it to comfort itself and fall asleep on its own--but then the screaming gets to be too much, and Ferberizing be damned, she goes up to comfort her child. Only to discover a rat sitting on her baby's belly, casually eating her baby's nose. (But I swear: It's nearly true!) Combine this with biblical tales of the Israelite's God smiting their foes with rodent plagues...
• My 10th grade English teacher claimed that during the Opium War, the Chinese would strap time-bombs to ducks and throw the ducks at British ships, apparently hoping that the ducks would flap over to the enemy boats just in time for the bombs to go off. He ended his tale by dryly noting that "the Chinese lost the war."
• Hell, even the LoS banner, top of this page, courtesy of .sWineDriveR., features, at least when I drafted this, a beast with dynamite strapped around its belly.

Like many "myths," however, these point to a largely unspoken truth: people use animals to kill other people. ("People are people, so why should it be...?")

In general, there may be no universally recognized horror in treating animals like tools, means to an end. Lab rats. Factory farms. Lab grown meat--flesh excised from the very soul--may be the logical (and, oddly, the most humane) extension of this idea (although headless chicken farms are a decidedly more extreme proposal).

But food is not the only deadly end for the animals we use: there is also war.Adrieene Mayor's Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (2003) has a chapter dedicated to the topic, Chapter 6: Animal Allies and Scorpion Bombs. There is lots of interesting stuff in this chapter, but what grabbed me the most was her presentation of a sort of arms race that developed in the use of livestock. If you don't mind giving me a bit literary license, I will try to carve an oversimplified and loose narrative here from my poor grasp of Mayor's facts, probably to the point getting some details wrong--but all in the spirit of fun and with an attempt to convey the facts correctly as I understand them.

Let's start by imagining the simple times when ancient cavalries could just charge about on horses. One day they decide to invade some desert peoples. Only it turns out that horses find camels repugnant--smelly and funny sounding--so the horses turn tail and flee.

So the horsemen get a few of their own camels and keep them about the stables/pastures. Now their horses are used to camels and are, therefore, willing to charge into battle against them.

Now all's going pretty well for horse warfare--until some horsemen run into war elephants. The horses panic and flee.

The solution? You guessed it, get a few elephants to keep around the horses (and their camel buddies?) so that horses don't freak when fighting elephant cavalries.

Well then at some point, someone discovered that elephants detest the sound of squealing pigs, so they started bringing pigs into battles and would poke them with spears if any elephants showed up

This is turning into a flippin' circus!

--the pigs would squeal and the elephants would stampede, often killing their handlers.

In an extreme case, someone actually rubbed down a bunch of pigs with flammable resin, put them in the front of a charge, and set them on fire when the enemy elephants showed up--absolutely horrifying!

War pigs indeed.

But back to our arms race: now the elephant breeders have to get pigs to raise around their elephants.

And at this point, do horsemen need to have camels and elephants and pigs just to keep up with the whole livestock escalation?

Madness.

Well, this post is already getting a bit long, and we haven't gotten close to DARPA, so I'm going to break this into two or three parts.

Stay tuned for a follow up, War Pigs II, soon! 

(Image source: "Squinty the Comical Pig" (1915) by Richard Barnum)

Tunguska, We Remember You

Today marks the anniversary: On June 30, 1905, Einstein's special theory of relativity was published, which led to his subsequent postulation that E=mc2.

Three year later to the day, June 30, 2008, a massive explosion--nearly 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima--occurred near the Tunguska River in Siberia.


According to an eyewitness:

"We had a hut by the river with my brother Chekaren. We were sleeping. Suddenly we both woke up at the same time. Somebody shoved us. We heard whistling and felt strong wind. Chekaren said, 'Can you hear all those birds flying overhead?' We were both in the hut, couldn't see what was going on outside. Suddenly, I got shoved again, this time so hard I fell into the fire. I got scared. Chekaren got scared too. We started crying out for father, mother, brother, but no one answered. There was noise beyond the hut, we could hear trees falling down. Chekaren and I got out of our sleeping bags and wanted to run out, but then the thunder struck. This was the first thunder. The Earth began to move and rock, wind hit our hut and knocked it over. My body was pushed down by sticks, but my head was in the clear. Then I saw a wonder: trees were falling, the branches were on fire, it became mighty bright, how can I say this, as if there was a second sun, my eyes were hurting, I even closed them. It was like what the Russians call lightning. And immediately there was a loud thunderclap. This was the second thunder. The morning was sunny, there were no clouds, our Sun was shining brightly as usual, and suddenly there came a second one!

"Chekaren and I had some difficulty getting out from under the remains of our hut. Then we saw that above, but in a different place, there was another flash, and loud thunder came. This was the third thunder strike. Wind came again, knocked us off our feet, struck against the fallen trees.

"We looked at the fallen trees, watched the tree tops get snapped off, watched the fires. Suddenly Chekaren yelled 'Look up' and pointed with his hand. I looked there and saw another flash, and it made another thunder. But the noise was less than before. This was the fourth strike, like normal thunder.

"Now I remember well there was also one more thunder strike, but it was small, and somewhere far away, where the Sun goes to sleep."

The prevailing theory is that it was a meteor (or comet) impact.

An alternative theory claims that at the exact moment of the explosion, Tesla tested a communication device, a device that led to the creation of Tesla's infamous death ray:

"At the time, Robert Peary was making his second attempt to reach the North Pole. Cryptically, Tesla had notified the expedition that he would be trying to contact them somehow. They were to report to him the details of anything unusual they might witness on the open tundra. On the evening of June 30, accompanied by his associate George Scherff atop Wardenclyffe tower, Tesla aimed his death ray across the Atlantic towards the arctic, to a spot which he calculated was west of the Peary expedition.

"Tesla switched on the device. At first, it was hard to tell if it was even working. Its extremity emitted a dim light that was barely visible. Then an owl flew from its perch on the tower's pinnacle, soaring into the path of the beam. The bird disintegrated instantly.

"That concluded the test. Tesla watched the newspapers and sent telegrams to Peary in hopes of confirming the death ray's effectiveness. Nothing turned up. Tesla was ready to admit failure when news came of a strange event in Siberia."

___
Image source: Page 2 of The Fantastic Four, Volume 1 # 13, "The Fantastic Four, Versus The Red Ghost" (part 1 of "Mystery on the Moon), page 315 of the 2005 Omnibus. Story by Stan Lee, Art by King Kirby.