Introduction
Throughout human history, people have succeeded in finding new and unusual ways to kill each other. Often people turn to the animal world to take from it what will help defeat the enemy on the battlefield. Sometimes animals were taken.
The Assyrians and Babylonians were some of the first to use fighting dogs, but they were far from the last. During the Great Patriotic War, dogs were used to blow up enemy tanks.
It is said that the Persian king Cambyses II drove cats - an animal sacred to his opponents, the Egyptians - before his army at the Battle of Pelusia in 525 BC.
Horses also played a key role in wars that took place until the first half of the 20th century. Domesticated animals are easy to make warriors. But if anyone really wants to stand out in a crowded field of militarized fauna, you need a little exotic.
Below we have compiled a list of wild animals that can be made excellent soldiers, well, or assistants who will deliver messages of particular importance, clear minefields or guard the borders of the state.
Elephants
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Hannibal (a Carthaginian general who lived from 247 to 183 BC) made excellent use of the elephant cavalry for his invasion of Italy during the Second Punic War. But no matter how terrible these ancient armored vehicles were, the Romans soon realized that during the advance of the elephants, it was enough to step aside and wait for this colossus to sweep through the ranks of the Romans.
The large size and weight of the elephants is great for destroying projectiles and fortifications, but they are too clumsy for the war against foot soldiers.
After all, Hannibal ran out of elephants long before the Romans ran out of Romans.
Dolphins
In the 1960s, these experienced cetacean warriors were recruited by the United States and the Soviet Union as part of the Cold War arms race. Trained by the navies of both countries to detect mines and enemy divers, the "war dolphins" continue to be used in the 21st century.
Rats
Historically, rats have been quite undesirable, although in many ways inevitable companions of world wars. They destroyed food on naval ships, spread disease in camps and ate unburied corpses.
During World War I, trench rats were so common that commanders were forced to enact a prohibition against shooting these creatures so as not to waste ammunition.
However, in the 21st century, rats have become a useful companion for sappers who are clearing mines created during the Second World War. The rats' supersensitive sense of smell allows them to detect even those mines that cannot be found with mine detectors.
Chimpanzee
Of course, equipping monkeys with firearms whose intelligence is close to that of a human, and whose strength is many times greater, is not a good idea. Therefore, the monkeys were never officially called up to serve in the army. However, they have played a prominent role in the superpower space race.
While the Soviet Union was conducting its space program by launching dogs into space, the United States worked its way into orbit with the help of a chimpanzee named Ham, who became the first ape astronaut to suborbital and became something of a mascot for the US space program. …
But Ham's future fate cannot be called cosmic. He died in 1983 after spending the rest of his life at the zoo, and his remains are buried at the New Mexico Space History Museum in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
In addition to Ham, there were other astronaut monkeys, whose fates were much worse than that of Ham. Many of them were simply handed over to scientific laboratories, where they died from various experiments.
Pigeons
Often referred to as the "rat with wings," the humble dove has served as an emissary on the battlefield since the days of Caesar Gaul in the first century BC. In many warriors, pigeons were used to deliver important messages from the battlefield to command headquarters and back.
Sher Ami's "homing" pigeon saved the lives of nearly 200 American soldiers by reporting that artillery fire had rained down on friendly troops.
During World War II, British intelligence service MI5 realized the potential for clandestine communication between German troops through pigeons and recruited a group of falconers to patrol British airspace.
According to a declassified report, the falcons never managed to shoot down a single enemy pigeon.
Snakes
To talk about snakes as warriors, you need to return to the story of the Carthaginian commander Hannibal, who received punches from the Romans, whom he wanted to trample with elephants. After being expelled from his native Carthage, Hannibal went on the run to the king of Bithynia named Prusius. But Hannibal turned out to be vindictive and decided to take revenge on the Romans for himself and for his elephants.
The king, to whom he fled, waged war with Eumenes II, the leader of Pergamum - an ally of the Roman state. Hannibal decided to take advantage of this and went with Prusius to the war against Eumenes. But the Bithynians did not have enough soldiers to attack from land, so it was decided to launch an attack from the sea.
The situation at sea for Prusius was not much better than on land, but Hannibal was much smarter than his allies. He decided to use snakes to attack the enemy flotilla, which outnumbered the Bithynian fleet. He ordered his men to collect them and place them in clay pots.
Then Hannibal did one single and victorious thing. He placed hundreds of earthenware pots with snakes on the catapults and threw them towards the enemy ships. The pots, falling on the decks of the enemy, broke and thousands of poisonous snakes crawled out of them.
Out of horror, the Pergamonians began to leave their ships in a hurry, jumping off them, and those who turned out to be bolder directed their ships in the opposite direction from the ships of Hannibal.
Biological warfare is usually fought against organisms that are invisible to the naked eye, but Hannibal was not a man of small gestures. So he defeated his enemies - the allies of Rome.