Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a Mental Floss essay by Colin Scanlon.
Our furry and feathered companions are inextricably part of our existence, not just bystanders in human history. They’ve served as messengers, test subjects, and even soldiers. Animals have never merely plodded alongside us (often without choice or recognition) through history—they’ve shaped it.
Cher Ami
Charles Whittlesey and his battalion of the US 77th Infantry Division, surrounded by Germans with rapidly diminishing rations of food, water, and ammunition, sat isolated in the Forest of Argonne amid the carnage and chaos of WWI’s Meuse-Argonne Offensive. After the Germans captured or killed all his human messengers, Whittlesey had to use the Army Signal Corps Pigeon Service to communicate.
With the Germans closing in and his own people dropping artillery rounds on him, Whittlesey sent a pigeon named Cher Ami back with a message pinpointing their location and requesting help. The Germans shot Cheri Ami down shortly after taking flight, just like the two pigeons sent before him. But he miraculously took flight again and reached the rear with Whittlesey’s plea—despite being shot through the chest, blinded in one eye, and with one leg nearly ripped off. While medics rushed to save Cher Ami, the brave bird succumbed to his injuries some months later.
194 members of Whittlesey’s “Lost Battalion” owed their lives to Cher Ami. The United States recognized him as a war hero and awarded him the Animals in War and Peace Medal of Bravery posthumously in late 2019.
Cairo
On the evening of 1 May 2011, 23 U.S. Navy SEALs, alongside , descended on Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s compound. Operation NEPTUNE SPEAR was the culmination of a years-long manhunt undertaken by the United States government to capture Bin Laden after the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
A six-year-old Belgian Malinois dog, Cairo—on track to retire from the military just a month before—sniffed for any hidden explosives or passageways in the compound, and patrolled the perimeter while the SEALs located and killed Bin Laden; this bought the SEALs time to gather intelligence and escape.
Cairo’s handler, Will Chesney, adopted him after the dog retired from military service in 2013; Cairo remained his loyal companion until his passing in 2015.
Dolly the Sheep
Revealed to the public in February 1997, Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned via somatic cell nuclear transfer. The revolutionary cloning technique implants the nucleus of an adult cell into an immature egg cell. The egg cell has had its own nucleus removed, and this process produces a nascent embryo. Scientists at the Rosalind Institute in Scotland spearheaded the technique.
Although Dolly was not the first ever animal cloned, that distinction belongs to the tadpole, her preeminence as the first mammal cloned from an adult cell showed monumental progress in the practice of cloning, even leading some scientists to speculate the practice could someday revive extinct species. Scientists euthanized the “original” Dolly in 2003 because she suffered from severe arthritis and respiratory disease, but her miraculous existence has continued to spark discussions surrounding scientific ethics and the potential of mammalian cloning.
The Monkey That Killed A King
During an October 1920 stroll through the expansive grounds of his royal family’s Tatoi Palace, a poorly domesticated Barbary macaque attacked and bit King Alexander of Greece. Despite prompt dressing and cleaning of the bites, the Greek king’s wounds soon became infected and quickly turned septic. While doctors debated whether to amputate the king’s leg, the infection continued its spread, and just weeks later, Alexander was dead.
Alexander was just 27 years old at the time of his death and left no heirs, opening a massive power vacuum in the increasingly precarious Greek monarchy. An election and referendum led to the reinstatement of Alexander’s father, the previously deposed King Constantine. He abdicated the throne again in 1922 following Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War.
Smoky
In February 1944, an American soldier stumbled upon a 4-pound Yorkshire Terrier hiding in a deserted foxhole deep in the New Guinea jungle and returned to camp with the pup and sold her to William Wynne, who gave her the name Smoky. Smoky served as Wynne’s devoted companion, completing a dozen combat missions and earning eight battle stars for her service in the South Pacific. Wynne credited her with saving his own life by warning him of an incoming bombing. Besides providing entertainment and comfort to injured troops in hospitals across the South Pacific, Smoky was a crucial component in the construction of a critical Allies airbase on the Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. She helped run a stretch of telegraph wire through a claustrophobic, 70-foot pipe, saving hundreds of soldiers from the risk of exposure to bombing by cutting a days-spanning project down to just a few minutes.
After returning from battle in 1945, Wynne and Smoky became a sensation, making over 40 television appearances together and never once repeating a trick. The duo spent the next 10 years traveling across the country to varying television appearances and veteran’s hospitals. Smoky passed away at approximately 14 years old in early 1957. Smoky posthumously became the first recorded therapy dog and sparked renewed interest in the Yorkshire Terrier breed.
Jim
Before the development of a diphtheria vaccine in 1923, doctors relied on antitoxin harvested from horses to treat the infection. Diphtheria, a serious bacterial infection targeting the respiratory system, was a very common and deadly disease that killed one in every 10 children infected prior to the antitoxin’s development. Diphtheria mortality plummeted when the antitoxin became widely available around the turn of the century before being functionally eradicated by the development and dissemination of a preventative vaccine.
One such horse, a retired milk wagon stallion named Jim, produced over 7 gallons of antitoxin before being diagnosed with tetanus and euthanized in 1901. After Jim’s death, scientists discovered that tetanus had contaminated his antitoxin, and that they had administered it to 13 children, causing their deaths. The first federal regulations for biopharmaceuticals then addressed instances of such contamination. This led to the formation of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in 1902, and later the Food and Drug Administration in 1906.
Tesla’s Pigeon
Though he believed any romantic or sexual entanglements would only distract from his scientific work, the eccentric inventor and lifelong bachelor Nikola Tesla had one great love in his life: a pigeon. In 1922, Tesla told friends that a striking white bird flew to his room to tell him she was dying, emitting a great white light from her eyes before passing away. He also said that he believed his life's work was complete after the pigeon died. Tesla’s career continued its precipitous decline, and the once-renowned inventor spent much of the rest of his life destitute and self-secluded. Following years of financial instability and a seriously diminishing public reputation, Tesla, well into his eighties, died at the Hotel New Yorker on 7 January 1943, after suffering coronary thrombosis.
Laika
Because of her docile nature, Russian scientists chose a stray husky-spitz mix plucked from the streets of Moscow, nicknamed Laika (Russian for “barker”) as the Sputnik II spacecraft’s lone passenger . She underwent extensive space training and conditioning before making her one-way journey into outer space. Although expected to perish on her journey into Earth’s orbit, her handlers packed Laika inside Sputnik II’s diminutive cockpit with a few days’ of food and water before launching into space on 3 November 1957.
Conflicting reports exist regarding exactly how and when Laika died, but she likely succumbed to overheating after just a few orbits around the Earth. Sputnik II continued to orbit the Earth for five months before disintegrating while reentering the atmosphere. The Russian space training center in Star City erected a statue of the canine cosmonaut in Laika’s memory.
The Pig That Nearly Started a War
In June 1859, Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer on Washington’s San Juan Island, shot and killed a pig belonging to Charles Griffin, an employee of the British Hudson’s Bay Company, after he’d discovered the animal rooting through his vegetable garden. Griffin demanded compensation for the pig; Lyman refused, saying said pig was on his land. Who owned the island—the US or Britain—had been in dispute for years.
After British authorities threatened to arrest Lyman, the US Army sent Captain George Pickett and a few dozen soldiers to San Juan Island to defend the American settlers. The British, interpreting this as an act of aggression, responded by sending three Royal Navy ships to San Juan; the US then answered this by dispatching hundreds more troops. President James Buchanan sent General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to negotiate terms with Sir James Douglas, Governor of the Colony of British Columbia, to avoid all out war. This incident, known to historians as the Pig War, came about because of differing interpretations of the British–American agreement delineating territory borders in the Pacific Northwest, the Oregon Treaty. After agreeing to share military control of San Juan Island in 1859, Wilhelm I of Germany, acting as mediator, granted the US full control of the island in 1872.
Sergeant’s Business and Other Stories
Writing about animals is a tricky business—it either turns into a children’s story or science fiction. I ventured into prehistory when I wrote “Into The Fire” about a hungry hunter who takes on a partner as desperate as he.
And Finally...
On 26 September:
1580: Frances Drake completes his circumnavigation of the Earth—the first by an English subject—landing at Plymouth, England, after a voyage of nearly four years. Authorized by Queen Elizabeth I and originally comprising five ships, the “voyage of discovery” was an ambitious raid and the start of England’s challenge to the global domination of Spain and Portugal.
1655: Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant led a fleet of warships to recapture Fort Casimir (today’s New Castle, Delaware) on the Delaware River from the Swedes, who had captured it the year before. This brought all of New Sweden bordering modern Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania under Dutch control.
And today is NATIONAL JOHNNY APPLESEED DAY, commemorating the birth of John Chapman/Johnny Appleseed on this day in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1774 (yes, he was quite real).