Unleash the Cats of War!

Animals have served as soldiers' best friends -- and as military scientists' playthings -- for thousands of years. The online humane society that is the *Cynical-C *blog runs down their favorite furry, fuzzy, and feathered wartime recruits. Here's a sample from #7: cats.

The earliest examples of cats being used in warfare dates back to the Ancient
Egypt during a war against Persia. The Persians, fully aware of the reverence that Egyptians paid to their felines, rounded up as many cats as they could find and set them loose on the battlefield. When the Egyptians were faced with either harming the cats or surrendering, they chose the latter...

The most creative way to use a cat as a weapon happened in World War II. The
United States’ OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA)
needed a way to guide bombs to sink German ships. Somebody hit upon the inspiration that since cats have such a strong disdain of getting wet and always land on their feet that if you attached a cat to a bomb and drop it in the vicinity of a ship, the cat’s instinct to avoid the water would force it to guide the bomb to the enemy’s deck. It is unclear how the cat was supposed to actually guide a bomb attached to it as it fell from the sky but the plan never got past the testing stages since the cats had a bad habit of becoming unconscious mid-drop.

Of course, with only seven slots, one couldn't hope to catalog all the crazy ways in which critters have been corralled into military service. So we'll forgive the Cynical-C crew for leaving out the mind-controlled sharks, mechanical pack mules, robolobsters, chemical-sensing chickens, crowd-curbing dogs, terror-fighting sea lions. And, of course, the cyborg rats and pigeons.

(High five: TOM, RIP)