Military animals, trained for war! Also Project Pigeon.

Today I stumbled on a wikipedia article about Military animals: It was a subject I didn’t have much reflection time on in the past, but it’s seriously a lot more awesome than it first looks like.

There is of course the traditional use to animals as transport and hauling help: horses, elephants, camels, mules, etc. This is nothing impressive.

However, where military animals become a lot more interesting is when they become weapons:

• War pigs. Those would be used against elephants: their squealing was known as a source of panick that would scare elephants and make them dangerous for their own troops.
• Bat Bombs, that were incendiary bombs attached to bats during World War 2.
• Monkeys as living incendiary bombs. They would be dressed in straw, dipped in oil and then set on fire.
• Anti-tank dogs, ‘developped’ by Russia during WW2. They were hungry dogs with explosives on their back, trained to seek food under enemy tanks. They would explode under them and act as mines.

But wait, animals do other things than carry stuff and drop bombs! Pigeons had the best of it. During World War 2 (yes, again), USA used to train Pigeons to pilot bombs under the Project Pigeon. Yes, pilot bombs.

My vision of War pigeons, from my brain to your screens.

Wikipedia gives us two examples on how it works:

1. The pigeon was placed inside the missile so that they could see out through a window. They were trained to peck at controls to the left or right, depending on the location of a target shape.
2. The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognize the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile’s flight controls, cause the missile to change course. Three pigeons were to control the bomb’s direction by majority rule.

“I guess that the more we add pigeons that peck, the more accurate our missiles will be… I am already thinking of a missile with 4, perhaps 5 pigeons!”

Silly? Yes, but the guy who tought of it still got $25,000 to train a few pigeons and try. He was never taken seriously, even though he managed to get a few good results.