History's Most Epic War You've Probably Never Heard Of
The Great Emu War.
In an age of cyberterrorism, modern civilization is vulnerable to all types of digital shenanigans. Elections. Commerce. Transportation. Social media. No area of society is free from the danger. Of all the potential threats, there’s one which risks our security more than any other. Who you ask? The Russians? The Chinese? No, actually, the answer is squirrels.
Squirrels just wanna have fun, but when a squirrel’s gone wild on any given powerline, damage is tremendous. According to former NSA deputy director John Inglis, the “No. 1 threat experienced to date by the U.S. electrical grid is squirrels.” In 1987, a single squirrel caused a 90 minute loss in power for Nasdaq’s trading computer, affecting twenty million trades.
This might all seem a bit nutty, but it’s not just squirrels who go to war with us. Humans have waged war against several belligerents in the animal kingdom, including squirrels, cobras, mosquitos, tigers, and more. But perhaps the most epic of these battles was Australia’s war with their menacing flightless bird. What historians now call the Great Emu War.
Dawnbreak on the second day of November 1932, the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery fired 10,000 rounds of ammunition in the territory between Perth and Kalgoorlie. The target? A band of invading emus.
You’ve heard of a pride of lions, a murder of crows, or a flock of seagulls… but a group of emus is called a mob of emus, a name which proved very appropriate. The mob smote the barren land, and the desperate ex-soldiers petitioned for military aid from George Pearce, the Minister of Defence. Anticipating a swift victory, Pearce answered the petition. War was declared.
The military soon realized they had deeply underestimated their adversary. Within a brutal week of engaging the enemy, several troops were recalled, with thousands of rounds fired and only 50-200 emus killed.
However, the government wizened up. Instead of deploying their own troops, they placed a bounty on the emus and supplied guns and ammo to the soldiers who populated the lands in the first place. In the years that followed, nearly 300,000 emus were killed in Western Australia.
The great emu war is hardly the only case of humans going to war against the animal kingdom. The outcome is rarely successful, and often it can be disastrous. In the 13th century, Pope Gregory IV believed black cats were disciples of Satan. He ordered their mass extermination. The kitty genocide lead to less black cats, no doubt, but the result was much worse. With less cats, the population of rats soared. The same rats which carried the black plague that decimated Europe. Woops.
Rather than learn from history, in 1958, Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong declared war on “four pests” ravaging China. These were rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. The government was effective in killing the pests, however, these animals were critical to the ecosystem. Their elimination caused severe ecological imbalance and played a major factor in the Great Chinese Famine which soon followed. Woops again.
Plagues and famine aside, it’s difficult for governments to implement effective strategies for ridding their lands of undesirable critters. In British-occupied India, cobras were highly problematic. The Brits implemented a cobra bounty system to take care of the slithering fiends. At first, the strategy proved effective. The impoverished residents delivered cobra heads to local authorities to cash out. However, after the initial dip in the population, locals began to recognize the opposite. Soon the cobra population soared despite more and more bounties being redeemed. How could this be?
Well, the people of India were ingenious here. Instead of hunting the cobras, they began to breed them for money. By the time the authorities caught on and abolished the policy, it was too late. The cobra problem had multiplied exponentially. This type of unintended consequence from a government policy is today called the “Cobra Effect.”
0:00 War on Squirrels
2:14 Great Emu War
6:00 Black Plague and Pest Campaign
6:30 Cobra Effect
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