Kamikaze dogs, burning pigs and bomb donkeys: animals at war

The epic is liked, without a doubt.

Remember the carrier pigeon

Cher Ami

, who saved from death 194 American soldiers lost in the fields of the Great War, near Verdun, by being able to deliver the message with the exact location of the battalion despite carrying a German bullet in the chest and one leg hanging from a tendon.

He likes to exalt deeds.

The story of the

Boston bull terrier Stubby

—Sergeant Stubby in the books—whose sense of smell saved his entire company from death by mustard gas and who captured a German spy.

Or the legend of the

Warrior horse

,

the British equine that survived four years of battles and trenches like those of the Somme.

Or the adventures of the macaque

Jackie

,

who reached the rank of corporal in the South African army during the Great War.

Animal epic, with its side of tragedy.

More information

The Legion Goat and Other Military Mascots

But then there is what David Sánchez has done in his book

Combat Animals

(Pinolia): a journey through the sacrifice of millions of animals in human war fields.

The most forgotten face of the senselessness that is war.

And it all started with some elephants and some burning pigs.

Sánchez is 42 years old and teaches Biology at a secondary school.

He was born in Herguijuela de la Sierra, Salamanca.

When he was little, his parents took care of a small farm with chickens, rabbits, pigeons and some cats that scared the mice.

He liked the farm.

However, it was those elephants that intimidated Alexander the Great on the battlefield, and how their effect was counteracted by the use of flaming pigs unleashed upon them with their chilling screeches, that continues to provoke the fascination that motivates this essay: a tour of the wars of all times and the involuntary role of the animal.

The volume rescues stories from all time.

The vessels with poisonous snakes that the Carthaginian Hannibal Barca threw against the enemy ships of King Eumenes II of Pergamon.

The 11 million equines – horses, mules, donkeys – that died in the Great War as transport, cargo and draft animals.

The dolphins trained by Putin's Russia for combat in polar waters, or the cetaceans of the United States to locate underwater mines.

The camels and donkeys loaded with explosives that the Taliban detonate by remote control in Afghanistan.

Albino rats dedicated to detecting mines in the Colombian jungle.

The two thousand kamikaze dogs that the Soviet army launched against the German tanks in the Battle of Stalingrad.

The two hundred thousand pigeons that were forced to fight as spies and messengers in the First World War.

Or insects recruited to damage agriculture, attack the enemy and transmit infectious diseases.

The Russian dog 'Laika', on 'Sputnik 2'.NASA

The book also revisits sacrifices derived from war.

There is a very curious one.

It took place in the Paris Zoo during the Prussian siege of 1870. It was winter and the Parisians were hungry and desperate.

That's why they didn't hesitate to eat the animals in the Jardin des Plantes.

Among them,

Castor

and

Pollux

, the two elephants that had taken so many children from the capital for a walk.

Now: it wasn't just survival.

There was also gluttony.

That Christmas, chef Alexandre Étienne Choson's restaurant served fried camel

nuggets

, kangaroo stew, antelope meat with truffles, elephant consommé, and bear chops with pepper sauce.

Another extraordinary case is that of the hundreds of thousands of cats that British families, at the beginning of the Second World War, sacrificed in their garden.

They were killed in less than a week by order of the National Animal Committee for the Prevention of Air Raids.

The German bombing of the big cities seemed imminent and the order was to sacrifice the animals that could not be sent to the countryside.

Out of compassion.

A pop icon was the death of

Laika

in the space race, another kind of war.

Mecano sang that on Earth there is one less dog and in the sky one more star.

In reality they were a few more stars.

Because Laika

's death

was preceded by another 48 dogs launched into space by the Soviet regime.

Belka, Strelka, Dezik, Tsygan, Lisa.

They are forgotten names that are summarized in another fundamental book:

Soviet Space Dogs

(Fuel).

Twenty of these astronaut dogs lost their lives and unleashed ubiquitous

merchandising

in the USSR, on par with Olympic legends or war heroes.

Death in space also affected macaques, mice and even flies launched into rockets so that man could analyze the impact of leaving Earth.

Cover of the book 'Animals of War'.

David Sánchez's research traces a profuse gallery of savages committed with animals in wars.

But it also shows other cruelties longed for and only half done.

For example, an American program developed in 1941 under the name X-Ray. It intended to launch thousands of bats against Japanese cities after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Each bat would carry small 17 gram incendiary bombs.

They were to cause terror in many bamboo wooden houses.

It wasn't necessary.

The nuclear discharges on Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented the work of these cartilage and bone drones with which they were experimented.

What

Little Boy

and

Fat Man

did not prevent was another cruel operation called The Atomic Ark, a delirium typical of the Cold War.

With this operation, deployed in the summer of 1946, the United States sought to frighten the Soviet Union and also investigate the biological effects of nuclear weapons.

As the author of

Combat Animals

narrates , in a remote Pacific archipelago—the Bikini Atoll—the North American Navy detonated a nuclear bomb against some boats that it had filled with 200 pigs, 60 guinea pigs, 204 goats, 5,000 rats, 200 mice and many insects.

A third of the specimens died from the detonation or from radiation.

That bomb in New York would have killed two million people.

On Bikini Atoll they were animals.

And almost no one remembers them.

David Sánchez explains to EL PAÍS that the evolution of war itself has reduced the use of animals in combat.

—Motorized vehicles replaced horses;

wireless telecommunications to carrier pigeons;

the battle tanks to the elephants.

There is firm legislation and more and more people are aware of animal respect.

However, animals are still used for military experimentation today.

Because human beings are a selfish species.

He was, is and will be in the future.

And if he again has to use animals to achieve his goals, he will end up using them, regardless of the consequences.

This disenchantment with the human species beats strongly in one of the stories in his essay.

It happened during the mythical Christmas truce of 1914. And the protagonist was a cat.

The French called him

Felix.

The Germans called him

Hans.

Both sides, from their respective sides of the trenches, had agreed to a ceasefire on the first Christmas Eve of the conflict.

The soldiers were tired of the mud, the cold and the boredom.

That day Christmas carols were sung, there were ceremonies to bury the dead and soccer games were played between enemies.

Gifts were even exchanged.

Félix mediated this approach.

The French sent him as a messenger to bring small gifts tied to his necklace to the enemy.

The Germans returned it, with other knotted details, towards the rival trench.

A nice Christmas story.

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