War Horse has nothing on spycatching gerbils and ammo-fetching bears

Ever heard of an animal conscientious objector? Exactly. And it’s not just the Taliban who train beasts to do their wartime bit

In a grainy Taliban video, a dog on a leash is surrounded by heavily armed men. The confused-looking canine is wearing a black protective vest and wags his tail at points. “Down with them, down with their spies!” one fighter exclaims. It must be one of the most oddest prisoner-of-war propaganda videos in history.

These dogs are being used in Afghanistan by the military to sniff out buried bombs and narcotics. But it’s not the first time an animal has had military credentials, of course: horses were an essential part of warfare for thousands of years, and there have been many examples of animals being held for spying – it was only last year that the Egyptian police kept a stork behind bars for this crime (the suspected spying device was actually a tag intended by conservationists to track its migration). But what other roles do and could animals play in human warfare?

1. Sniffing and detection

The bee is pretty intelligent, and honeybees have been trained to recognise the scent of bomb ingredients. Once trained, the bees are strapped into a cartridge and exposed to air samples – if the bee picks up the scent of explosives, a camera in the cartridge records its reaction. The company developing the technology intends the bees to be unstrapped at the end of their “shift”.

Dolphins have extraordinary natural biological sonars and have been used by the US Navy to detect swimmers and divers. If an intruder is about, the dolphin touches the sensor on a boat, which in turn alerts the handler. The dolphin is trained to swim to the intruder, bump him or her from behind and swim away while military personnel take over.

MI5 once intended to have a gerbil spycatcher. The plan in the 1970s was to recruit a team of specially trained gerbils to detect spies and terrorists flying into the UK. This was because the furry animals can detect a rise in adrenalin from the scent of human sweat. This was actually put into practice by Israel, and gerbil cages were put on the side of security checks for travellers at Tel Aviv airport. The scheme was aborted when the Israelis found that the gerbils could not tell the difference between threats to aviation and passengers scared of flying.

2. Carriers

Voytek the soldier bear was an important mascot adopted by Polish troops in 1943, after an Iranian boy gave the cub to a Polish refugee in exchange for cans of food. Wojtek grew into a 6ft, 250lb bear and was trained to carry mortar shells, boxes of ammunition, and the bare necessities for the soldiers. In 1944, he was officially enlisted in the Polish army and was a hero of the second world war, with name, rank and number. Horses, donkeys and mules have carried and pulled for many …read more