Military animal

Dogs have long been employed in a wide variety of military purposes, more recently focusing on guarding and bomb detection, and along with dolphins and sea lions are in active use today.

[22] The Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project to use surgically modified cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies in the 1960s.

This was followed by international mockery and criticism of the Arab media outlets which uncritically had reported on the bird's alleged role in espionage.

[28] In 2012, a dead European bee-eater tagged with an Israeli leg band was found by villagers near the south-eastern Turkish city of Gaziantep.

Turkish authorities examined the corpse of the bee-eater and assured villagers that it is common to equip migratory birds with rings in order to track their movements.

On land, giant pouched rats such as the Gambian giant pouched rat have been tested with considerable success as specialised mine detecting animals, as their keen sense of smell helps in the identification of explosives and their small size prevents them from triggering land mines.

The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program uses military dolphins and sea lions for underwater sentry duty, mine clearance, and object recovery.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Nationalist pilots attached fragile supplies to live turkeys, which descended flapping their wings, thus serving as parachutes which could also be eaten by the defenders of the monastery of Santa Maria de la Cabeza.

The scheme involved burying nuclear bombs in the ground for later detonation should occupied (West) Germany be overrun by Warsaw Pact forces.

The primitive electronic devices of the 1950s were unreliable in frozen ground, and the chickens were considered as a source of biogenic heat.