Stone - The Diggers Menagerie

The first animal to be adapted for military use was the horse. Domesticated on the Eurasian steppes near present-day Ukraine around 5,500 years ago, horses were raised mostly for their meat, and archaeological findings suggest it wasnt long before herdsmen began to ride them. In the late second millennium BCE larger horses were being bred in Eurasia and central Asia, allowing for sustained riding and the emergence of the first cavalry units around 900BCE. The horses evolution into a vehicle for war was a gradual one and had come on the back of three pivotal inventions: the chariot, the saddle and the stirrup. The stirrup allowed horsemen to traverse vast distances in relative comfort, and in the first millennium CE the breast-and-shoulder harness was invented, superseding the inefficient throat-and-girth harness. Control over horses enabled the elite to exercise their power over large areas of land. They could now subjugate, intimidate and dominate peasant communities within their own borders and covet and acquire new lands beyond those borders.

Horses were used extensively as cavalry by Muslim armies throughout the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries, and in the 13th century became draught animals for the first time when gunpowder began to be adapted for use in artillery. With the development of heavy artillery pieces in the 19th century, sturdier, heavier breeds were used to haul increasingly burdensome loads. During the American Civil War it was calculated that a single artillery horse could haul 1,300 kilograms over 30 kilometres in a single day if the roads were paved, and 500 kilograms if the ground was rough. One and a half million horses perished during the four years of Americas Civil War.

The use of elephants in warfare is first recorded in the eighth century BCE Indian epic the Mahabharata , 400 years before Alexander the Great used them to help guard his tent while campaigning. In 225 BCE, as Roman Legions advanced on Carthage, the Carthaginians placed 100 elephants side by side in front of their own infantry. The Romans fell in heaps according to the Greek historian Polybius as the elephants encircled them. The greater number, Polybius wrote in The Histories , were trampled to death by the vast weight of the elephants, while the remainder were shot down by the numerous cavalry in their ranks as they stood.

Not even insects were spared in warfare. The ancient Romans catapulted beehives over the defensive walls of medieval towns and forts to create confusion prior to an attack. In the 11th century the soldiers of Henry I of England hurled bees into the army of Duke Giselbert of Lorraine, and during the Third Crusade in the 12th century, King Richard the Lionheart threw beehives into the ranks of the Saracens.

War dogs have been deployed on the battlefields of Europe and Asia for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks and Persians wrapped their dogs in armour and adorned their necks with spiked collars to prevent enemy dogs from tearing away their dogs soft flesh. The Roman Empire took hundreds of giant Molossian dogs with them on their conquests, sending them into battle not only with spiked collars on their necks but around their ankles too. The Molossians most likely ancestors of the Tibetan mastiff were starved by the Romans prior to a fight; their jaws, capable of exerting up to 1,500 pounds (around 680 kilograms) of pressure per square inch, could crush the bones of their adversaries.

The first-century Roman historian Pliny the Elder left several accounts of dogs charging down heavily armed human opposition, without any regard for the odds or their own well-being. In the first book of Natural History , Pliny wrote:

Two hundred dogs restored from Exile a King of the Garamantes; fighting against all that opposed him. The Colophonians possessed Squadrons (Cohorts) of Dogs for War; and these were put in front of the battle, and were never known to draw back.

Attila the Hun took Molossian dogs on his marches of conquest through Europe in the fifth century, while the Middle Ages saw the continued development of canine body armour such as chest plates and hinged side-plates. The Irish used wolfhounds to attack marauding Norman conquerors in the 12th century; Frederick the Great used dogs as messengers during the Seven Years War (175663); and in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte chained dogs outside the fortifications surrounding the Egyptian city of Alexandria to provide an early warning against night-time assaults. Napoleon even took poodles into battle. He ordered their hair be brushed out to puff them up so they would appear as larger targets in the hope enemy fire would pass through their fur and leave their bodies unharmed.

Australias story of involving animals in battle began when it sent 40,000 horses to assist the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War of 18991902. In the Great War, the Imperial Camel Corps participated in campaigns throughout the Sinai and Palestine, and the Walers of the 4th Light Horse Brigade charged towards and then over the entrenched lines of Turkish machine guns at Beersheba. In the Second World War Australian pigeon fanciers donated their birds to the military who used them to keep lines of communication open across the inhospitable highlands of Papua New Guinea when heat and humidity combined to render useless a units portable wireless.

As the worlds armies became increasingly mechanised, the need for animals to haul artillery and supply wagons ended. Advances in communications technology saw pigeon corps disbanded; horses were left overseas and sold as remounts, given over to local communities or sold to butchers; and donkeys and mules again became beasts of burden. Dogs, however, still had skills that technology could not surpass. As new threats evolved, dogs were trained in how to counter them tracker dogs became Mine Detection Dogs, and as explosives became more complex, the dogs were trained to become the Explosives Detection Dogs the Australian military are using to locate Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan today.

Animals have made an essential contribution to the conflicts in which Australia has participated in over the last two centuries. Animals have been through the muck and mire of battle beside soldiers of their country and other allied nations. These loyal beasts, toiling away in the background, are the often forgotten victims of war.

In 1899 Australia was into its fourth year of the seven-year-long Federation Drought, which killed half the nations sheep and almost half of its cattle and for six months bled the Murray River dry; the leaders of the six colonial governments met in Melbourne to discuss the pros and cons of confederation, and southern New South Wales was chosen as the region for the new bush capital; an electric tramcar, with two timber bench seats able to carry 22 passengers and an outside canopy over its driver, rattled along George Street towards Circular Quay for the first time; and Merriwee, a three-year-old colt from Condoblin, won the 39th Melbourne Cup.

Contemporary estimates put Australias population in 1899 at about 3,700,000 (not including Indigenous Australians, who were ignored in official statistics but whose numbers are estimated to have been anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million). Australia was also home to more than 1.5 million horses; around half a horse for every non-Indigenous man, woman and child in the country.