The Animals Hired for a Job
Toads shipped to eat a beetle they could not reach, mongooses on the day shift, chickens drawn up as a heater, and bats issued tiny firebombs.
Someone looked at an animal and saw a tool. Australia wanted a beetle eaten. Hawaiian sugar planters wanted rats dead. A British weapons file wanted electronics kept above freezing. The United States Army wanted a bomb that would find a dark place to hang. The animal did the job it was built for. That was the problem.
In August 1935, cane toads bred from a handful caught in Hawaii were turned loose near Cairns. Nobody had checked whether a ground-bound toad could reach a beetle that stays high on the cane. In 1883, seventy-two mongooses arrived on the Hāmākua coast of Hawaiʻi, shipped from Jamaica to kill the rats in the sugarcane. The mongooses hunted by day. The rats worked at night. Blue Peacock was a nuclear landmine of about seven tons whose file proposed sealing live chickens inside, with food and water, so their body heat would keep the circuits from freezing. The National Archives released that file on 1 April 2004 and had to tell reporters that the Civil Service does not do jokes. In May 1943, bats carrying napalm woke earlier than the plan and set fire to the Army’s own airfield. B. F. Skinner’s pigeons pecked at ships on a screen and steered a glide bomb in test after test. The military shut Project Pigeon down on October 8, 1944, because nobody would take the birds seriously enough to wait for them. In 1971 a laboratory in Batavia paid $35 for Felicia, a ferret whose job was to run a string through a vacuum pipe so a swab could be pulled back after her. She would go about 300 feet. The pipe sections ran about 2,600.
One story in the set bends the hire. In July 1902, Hanoi was paying a bounty for rat tails. A French official then saw a healthy rat with no tail. The rats the bounty was meant to erase were still alive, and the payroll had given them a reason to stay that way.
This page is the shelf those assignments share. Start here for cane toads, and for the longer record of animals handed a job the job description did not survive.
- The $35 Ferret Hired to Clean a Particle Accelerator
- The Mongooses Hired to Hunt Rats — Who Worked the Day Shift
- The Rat-Tail Bounty That Turned Hanoi Into a Rat Farm
- The Bomb Full of Sleeping Bats That Burned Down Its Own Air Base
- The Nuclear Landmine Britain Planned to Keep Warm With Live Chickens
- The Bomb Three Pigeons Were Trained to Steer
- The Toad Australia Released to Fight a Pest — and Turned Into a Bigger One