Animals at War
On the interspecies alliances that shape world history
Buzzcut is a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by Zander Abranowicz, strategy director at Abbreviated Projects, a design studio. Read our reports on dandy influencers, Saint Lucia, rainwear, ivory-billed woodpeckers, sailing, and more. This edition is best in your browser or on the Substack app.
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Animals at War
Summer night, circa 390 BC. A gaggle of sacred geese is trying to get some rest outside the temple of Juno, atop the Capitoline, one of Rome’s seven hills. Fowl are light sleepers by nature, and the restlessness of the Roman soldiers huddled around fires higher up the mount is contagious. Some of the birds cope by burying their tufted heads into their own downy backs like natural pillows. Others shift anxiously from webbed foot to foot, murmuring softly.
With the moon hidden above the clouds and absent the usual constellation of torches and candles, the darkness is total in the city below. Somewhere in that void prowls the Senones — a Gallic tribe from the Seine region of ancient France — suspiciously quiet after a spree of triumphant sacking. The Senones have reason to rejoice: just days earlier, they vanquished a legion of Romans by the river Allia, clearing a road into the heart of the fragile city-state. Only this last handful of Roman defenders remains, marooned on a flickering island in the sea of night.
Juno’s sacred geese know none of the geopolitical peril around them, but down the slope, they hear something, or someone, break the silence, and do what geese do when startled: honk. Their sudden ungainly chorus rouses the weary legionnaires, who swiftly mobilize to repel the ascending horde, and save the young republic. For letting the Senones approach the Capitoline undetected, Rome will crucify dogs near the Circus Maximus every year on the date of this battle. Geese will oversee the proceedings from gold litters, resting on cushions of purple, the most hallowed hue of antiquity, extracted from the mucus gland of a predatory sea snail.
Humans have been augmenting our own limited senses with those of more perceptive animals since long before the advent of domestication. In prehistoric times, a skill for interpreting the behavior of beasts conferred concrete advantages in survival. Birds taking flight over a forest, for example, might betray the approach of a rival band. Wild sentinels can therefore be considered the earliest animals “used” in human conflict. What came next in the evolution of war animals is foggy. Lucretius speculated in the first century BC that primitive man likely tried and failed to “enlist wild beasts such as lions or savage boars in the service of war.”
Creatures great and small have since played many parts in the ongoing story of human strife, from the vigilant Capitoline geese to the Malinois dogs now fighting for Israel in the tunnel complex beneath Gaza. War animals have always been a source of fascination for our species, bringing out a sense of childish wonder in even the stodgiest historian, and serving as fodder for many artists, from the anonymous Assyrian stone carver who embedded an armored mastiff into a bas-relief at the city of Birs Nimrud around 600 BC, to Steven Spielberg. As technology forces the retirement of more and more war animals after thousands of years of active service, we might reflect on the debt we owe to them, and consider ways to begin paying it back.
The dog was the first animal intentionally drafted into humankind’s living arsenal. Domesticated in Eurasia at least 14,000 years ago, canines were our early hunting companions, guards, bed-warmers, and even engines to pull our sleds, all critical roles in the harsh primitive world. It’s unclear when they were first sent into battle, but the oldest evidence of war dogs begins to appear circa 600 BC, simultaneously making an appearance in the aforementioned stone relief at Birs Nimrud (today in Iraq), and in Asia Minor, where the Greek military strategist and war historian Polyaenus describes King Alyattes of Lydia using trained dogs to drive the invading Cimmerians out of his kingdom and back to their haunts on the Pontic-Caspian steppe.
The historical record of the ancient world pulses with breathless anecdotes in this vein. Pliny records that one ruler of the Garamantes, a civilization occupying present-day Libya, maintained 200 war dogs that “did battle with all those who resisted him.” Aelian states that the legendary Greek hoplites used war dogs during the first Persian invasion of Greece, while Herodotus testifies that Xerxes commanded legions of Indian hounds during the second Persian invasion ten years later. On the Stoa Poikile in the Agora of Athens, keen observers will find one heroic hound immortalized beside his master after serving with valor at the fateful battle of Marathon in 490 BC.
Dogs also played unexpected, even bizarre, defensive roles. In Cambyses II’s invasion of Egypt in 525 BC, he positioned dogs as well as ibex, sheep, cats, and other creatures regarded as sacred by the Egyptians as “animal shields” at the front of Persian lines near the city of Pelusium. The tactic succeeded. Egypt’s archers wouldn’t let fly their arrows for fear of hitting the animals, Pelusium fell, and Cambyses stormed through the kingdom, crowning himself pharaoh and absorbing Egypt as a province of the Achaemenid Empire for the next 121 years.
Many of our modern breeds were born on the battlefield. The term “mastiff” describes a brawny, short-coated dog used for at least 3,000 years in bloodsporting, hunting, guarding, and notably, fighting in battle. Our Cane Corso, Boxer, Bulldog, Rottweiler, Dogue de Bordeaux, and Great Dane (among many others) all trace their lineage back to this ur-breed, which accompanied Greek, Persian, and Roman armies on campaign. Even the puny French Bulldog can claim genetic affinity with these terrifying four-legged fighters.
Dalmatians, meanwhile, patrolled the borders and islands of the coastal region of Dalmatia in modern-day Croatia, while ancestors of the Chow Chow, some have speculated, might have arrived in China with Mongol armies after emerging in northern Siberia. Irish wolfhounds, for their part, saw battle beside Celts in confrontations with Romans and Normans.
Untold other dogs of war have disappeared. The lost Molossian, or Epirus Mastiff, was Rome’s preferred breed for battle. Its predecessor, the Alaunt, was first bred by the nomads of the North Caucasus. Before fading into history, it was used by the Spanish to terrorize Amerindians, among other violent exploits.
A range of other breeds was used in war-adjacent activities, from hunting and sending messages to tracking and guarding camps. King Philip II of Macedonia, for one, is said to have used bloodhounds to pursue his enemies through the rugged Balkan range. The warlord father of Alexander the Great, however, was more known for his innovative application of that other infinitely magnetic war animal: the horse.
Under Philip, the Macedonian army began using massed cavalry charges, which devastated rival city-states like Athens and Thebes. Horses had been used in chariot warfare, skirmishing, raiding, transporting men and supplies, and scouting for as long as 4,000 years, starting on the Eurasian steppe before thundering into the Mediterranean basin. But Philip wisely wedded the unparalleled strength and speed of larger horses with the security of thick armor, the brawn of equally armored warriors, and novel formations designed to deliver both physical and psychological devastation.
At Chaeronea in 338 BC, Philip’s mounted shock tactics, directed in part by his 18-year-old son Alexander, crushed the last resistance to Macedonian hegemony among the Greek statelets, with the exception of Sparta, and positioned him to mobilize a consolidated force against the greater prize: Persia. But before he could, history’s most famous father was stabbed to death by his bodyguard — assassinated, like Lincoln, while attending theater in the capital of his realm.
Over the next 13 years, Alexander would take his father’s army, and its signature equine tactics, to dominate a spread of earth covering three continents and roughly two million square miles, a territory stretching from modern Ethiopia to Kyrgyzstan, from Romania to India. His legendary expeditions would put West and East into contact like never before, and pit the horse against a menagerie of perilous creatures, sent into the fray in fantastical and creative ways.
On its long march to the Indus delta, Alexander’s army lay siege to the city of Harmatelia, a seat of Brahman power located in present-day Pakistan. According to an account by Diodorus Siculus, written between 36 and 30 BC, the city’s defenders had treated their weapons with the venom of Russell’s viper. Even a small scratch from these poisoned blades or arrows could result in a grueling death, presaging modern biological warfare. “When a man was wounded,” Diodorus writes, “the body became numb immediately and then sharp pains followed, and convulsions and shivering shook the whole frame. The skin became cold and bile appeared in the vomit, while a black froth was exuded from the wound and gangrene set in.”
Alexander also found crafty ways to use unexpected animals to his benefit. In Persia, he affixed branches on the tails of sheep so they would raise clouds of dust, causing his enemy to inflate its assessment of Greek ranks. A similar trick was later utilized by Hannibal to spook the Roman army. The Carthaginian general strapped torches to flocks of sheep so that at night, they created the impression of thousands of campfires. Such “herd tactics” were also used extensively during China’s Warring States period, including one instance in which oxen were dressed and painted as dragons, lit on fire, and sent to trample the opposing force.
Of the exotic animals encountered by Alexander during his wars of expansion, none was so intimidating, and consequential, as the elephant. Macedonians first faced a line of battle-ready pachyderms at Gaugamela, where Darius III positioned fifteen at the Persian front. Their appearance, and spectacular trumpeting, sent terror through Alexander’s army. The night before the battle, the Macedonians made a sacrifice to Phobos, god of fear, ostensibly to frighten their opponents, but perhaps also to inoculate themselves against the enemy within.
By the time he marched into India, where elephants had been used in war since at least 1100 BC according to Sanskrit hymns, Alexander had amassed a sizeable elephant corps, but hadn’t yet met the creatures in active battle. That changed at the Hydaspes River, where he clashed with the army of King Porus and its sizable contingent of Indian war elephants, each bearing a howdah, or platform, upon which rode a mahout, or elephant master, and archers.
The Macedonians were ready. They launched javelins to slay the mahouts or blind the unfortunate beasts, sending them back to trample or gore Porus’s own foot soldiers and cavalry. The strategy succeeded. Alexander won the day, but not without losses: among the dead was his beloved Bucephalus, one of history’s most famous war horses, among a pantheon that includes Robert E. Lee’s gray American Saddlebred, Traveller, and Napoleon’s Arabian stallion, Marengo, immortalized in Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps. In Bucephalus’s place, Alexander would welcome 150 of Porus’s prized war elephants to his side.
And yet, despite his momentum, and swelling company of war animals, Alexander knew that greater challenges remained ahead. The still-unconquered kingdoms to the east possessed vast armies of elephants, a decisive factor in Alexander’s world-historical decision to turn his army around. Back in Babylon, he anointed an “elephantarch” to command his “elephantry,” and selected a special force of these magnificent, intelligent creatures to guard his own palace.
After the young conqueror’s death at 32, and the disintegration of his empire into the Seleucids, in Western Asia, and the Ptolemies, in North Africa, war elephants became a fixture of western armies, which they would remain until gunpowder and mounting tactical challenges rendered them more of a liability than an asset. (The historian Josiah Ober estimates that during the Hellenistic age, the odds favored whichever army had fewer elephants.) Before their decline, though, elephants would help Rome conquer Greece, Hispania, and possibly Britain, while Rome’s archenemy, Carthage, would ride 37 North African forest elephants over the Alps, where all but one specimen of this extinct subspecies succumbed to the cruel alpine frost.
Were a Cimmerian horseman, Athenian hoplite, or Indian mahout transported to the twenty-first century, they would be astonished by our ways of war. Autonomous drones, cyber warfare, nuclear missiles, and so many other inventive means of combat have transformed and complicated our battlefields. In addition to the high-tech tools of modern warfare, however, our time travelers would find some familiar features. Among them, the dog.
Man’s best friend is still our best option for certain tasks in war. During the raid to kill Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, first caliph of the Islamic State, an American military dog pursued Baghdadi down a tunnel, incurring injuries when the terrorist detonated a suicide vest. Recently, only days before the Israeli Defense Force killed three hostages in a tragic friendly fire incident in Gaza, a military dog from Israel’s famed Oketz canine unit, equipped with a mounted GoPro camera, managed to record the hostages’ voices, before being shot dead by Hamas terrorists.
The end of the dog’s role in human war, however, may very well be near. Israel, among other technically advanced nations, is exploring the use of robots to spare canines the risk of charging into dangerous environments. Haaretz reports that a canine-esque walking robot called Vision 60, produced by a Philadelphia-based robotics lab, is being tested by Oketz to survey buildings, battlefields, and tunnels for IEDs and enemy combatants before humans are sent in.
It’s only a matter of time before technology sends the dog the way of the war horse, the camel, and the mule — that unsung hero of so many conflicts. These living, breathing war machines were rendered all but obsolete by machine guns and motorized transport, two features that defined the industrialized killing fields of World War I. Some 16 million animals served in that last great gasp of animal warfare, with an estimated nine million falling alongside the 40 million soldiers and civilians lost in the conflict. Dogs and pigeons carried messages, canaries signaled poisonous gasses, and cats and terriers hunted the rats that ruled the trenches.
Animals also made a stand, in diminished numbers, in World War II. The United States continued to use pigeons to convey secret intelligence; horses carried soldiers on patrol in Europe, and even saw battle in the Philippines; and thousands of dogs aided the U.S. Army, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps. Allied forces used elephants to transport supplies in the Pacific theater; while up north, the Soviet Union and Sweden experimented (unsuccessfully) with moose as deep snow cavalry animals. In one surreal misadventure, the United States considered using Mexican free-tailed bats to deposit small bombs over Japan — a project that was abandoned for the more decisive atomic bomb.
Our horseman, hoplite, and mahout might also marvel at the submarine creatures trained to fight on our behalf. Dolphins, seals, sea lions, and even beluga whales have been used for tasks ranging from assisting divers, to recovering objects, to detecting mines and torpedoes, to even killing unidentified interlopers in aquatic war zones. In 2019, fishermen off the coast of Norway spotted a beluga whale wearing a camera and tight harness with the words “Equipment St. Petersburg.” Speculation pointed to Russian espionage, perhaps an escape from the nearby naval base at Murmansk. Having become accustomed to human interaction during its training, the retired cetacean spy has remained in northern waters, where conservationists are using his story to draw attention to the moral complexity of sending intelligent creatures to war.
It’s a quirk of the human heart that we rarely flinch when soldiers are blown to bits on a silver screen battlefield, but we do when a horse or dog is killed. Animals embody innocence, and nothing disturbs the conscience like the slaughter of innocents. Aggression, intimidation, and physical force are of course the means by which many animals survive, but they do not enjoy, in any recognizable human sense, inflicting terror. Some animals engage in behaviors resembling raiding, territorial expansion, and internecine conflict, but scientists generally agree that they do not make war by any formal definition. They exist in Rousseau’s “state of nature,” beyond the nuances of human morality. We, with our many-folded brains, are simply animals with the power to choose between right and wrong, good and evil.
Animals do not choose to fight for us. To their detractors, they fit into a category of combatants without consent, alongside child soldiers, a phenomenon widely abhorred, indicative of the most lawless and brutal conflicts on earth. How, therefore, knowing all that we now know of animal sentience, and even their capacity to develop PTSD, can we justify sending them to fight?
Animals suffer alongside civilian populations in wartime, and always have. During World War II, stranded and famished Japanese soldiers subsisted on the Wake Island rail, eating the flightless bird into extinction. The Barbary lion’s last viable habitat was destroyed during the 1958 French-Algerian War, also leading to its extinction. Agent Orange poisoned decades of fish and bird populations in Vietnam and Cambodia. Examples proliferate, in every conflict on record. From habitat destruction, to sound pollution, to the introduction of invasive species, to the weakened governance of conservation areas, war is hell for humans and non-humans alike.
If the fates of humans and other animals are shared in war, there’s an argument to be made that our continued martial symbiosis is justified in the service of peace. The highest purpose of war is to maintain stability, and stability benefits all living things, whether we walk on two legs or four.
But if we wish for them to fight, and honor a record of service that extends to the beginning of our history, we ought to afford animals better protection in the laws of war. Today, international law has little to say about animals, and nations do little to fill the void. The United States counts war dogs as “equipment.” In Australia, they are “technology.” For all our monuments honoring war dogs, and even the bestowal upon them of our highest military honors, the U.S. Department of Defense continues to conduct vile experiments in “wound labs,” where dogs and other animals are subjected to various tortures to test weaponry and simulate human injury.
The same goes for “non-combatant” creatures. The Hague Conventions prohibit the destruction and seizure of enemy property, but international law scholars disagree as to whether animals constitute “property,” considering their sentience. Expanding the anthropocentric basis of international humanitarian law could, theoretically, prevent cruelty against animals in wartime.
The dove serves as our universal symbol of peace. In the Bible, the bird signaled salvation to the remnant few adrift after the great flood. Animals have a unique power to provide salvation after trauma, helping heal our hidden wounds when the guns go quiet. The American Psychiatric Association asserts that service dogs have “reduced severity of symptoms, improved mental health and improved social interactions” among veterans and others suffering from PTSD. Among the list of almost supernatural tasks which dogs can be conditioned to complete: nudging or placing its head in a veteran’s lap when they sense anxiety; positioning themselves behind the veteran to alert when someone is approaching; and even recognizing when a veteran is having a nightmare, and gently nudging them awake.
An animal’s uncanny power to make humans whole again after our disintegration into violence is reason enough for their supreme protection in law and practice. Since the beginning, animals have fought for humans. Now it’s time for us to fight for them.
It’s been a while
You might have noticed that this newsletter has been sitting fallow for a few months. A lot has changed during this unplanned hiatus. In my life, in the world.
We moved back to New York, closer to my family and to my wife’s new job. She gave me a beautiful dappled dachshund named Judd as a birthday gift. He keeps me company while I work, and on long walks in our new neighborhood. Virgin foliage is starting to soften the city’s rough edges, which I admit seem rougher after three years in the gentle confines of Richmond.
Truthfully, my ink all but froze on October 7th, and it has taken an unexpectedly long while to thaw. After the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, anything I wrote sounded absolutely irrelevant. In the months after, it seemed like arms were the only things capable of communicating the message that mattered, to Hamas and to the world. That’s changed in the past few weeks, as I found in war animals a subject worth sinking my teeth into.
Moving forward, Buzzcut will continue to claim space for highly relevant and news-breaking topics like Philip of Macedonia’s cavalry tactics, Rachel Carson’s sojourn on the Carolina coast, and medieval dancing mania. I plan to keep it a little looser in terms of schedule and format. You’ll hear from me when I have something worth saying. Thanks, as ever, for your enthusiasm.
If you’re in New York, let’s get a coffee. I’ll bring Judd.
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
Greenland sharks, the world’s longest-living vertebrates, can survive up to 500 years, meaning members of the species alive today were alive at the same time as Shakespeare
beyond best birthday gift. enjoy all.