Bat Bomb

Animals make good weapons. I'm surprised it never really caught fire; use of animals in warfare was normally restricted to transportation throughout history. We used horses, elephants, and dogs. Although I question if dogs were ever used for large scale wars and if so, they must've had limited involvement. I'm talking about those moments in movies when armies just have a trained group of animals doing their dirty work. Avatar comes to mind. It wasn't even a single species; the entire animal kingdom united to fend off the settlers. That made no sense because the animals were somehow invulnerable to bullets, but it was still a fascinating notion. Why haven't we tried that? Maybe it's too hard to tame anything other than a cat or dog.

Admittedly, animals are pretty unreliable. I hate those stories about dogs who save their owners from a burning house or bear attack. They're supposed to show everyone the power of animal companionship, but I'm just thinking about the thousand untold stories of the dog who turned a blind eye to his owner when he was in danger. Take the Siegfried & Roy accident; here we have two professionals who trained a tiger for six years since it was a cub. Then, the tiger suddenly feels the urge to bite something and arbitrarily goes for his owner's neck. If animals can't even tell friend from foe, I have little hope for them on the battlefield.

That's why I don't buy the whole Noah's Ark story. I don't think animals have the capacity for cooperation, much less large-scale organization. If we actually tried to get two animals of each species on a boat, I'm sure they would resort to a last-animal-standing basis.

Apparently the US government experimented with bat bombs in WWII. A bat bomb is a bat with an incendiary bomb attached to it. They were planning to send colonies of bat bombs over to Japan and detonating them once the colonies planted themselves inside cities. I have no idea how they were planning to control these colonies of explosive bats, and I guess this was one of the problems that led to its closure 1944. In fact, one army base in New Mexico was utterly wasted by bat bombs because they were accidentally released. They couldn't even contain the bats and they were planning to send them thousands of kilometres across the Pacific, through tumultuous storms and currents, and stealthily plant themselves near infrastructure (I suppose the Japanese people wouldn't see these colonies of bats invade their buildings). Seems like they were trying to run before they knew how to walk.