At least Laika server for a noble cause. What I think is terrible is the fact that Soviet Army tied up bombs on dogs and let the run after enemy tanks on the WWII. Humans sometimes acts disgustingly.
The German death machine grinds down circa 30 million Soviet people, majority of them civilians, the hot take is being mad the red army for tank dogs. Sometimes the comments here are really special in their lack of context.
It wasn't one or the other, it was both 30 million dead AND some unknown number of dogs killed that very likely didn't make a meaningful difference in the Soviet war effort. Congrats on getting down to the level of your enemy, I guess.
Like strapping a bomb to a dog that might very well just run off into the woods or throwing it with your arm like everyone else, right? Somehow I feel like the tank dog idea didn't come up from cutting edge military science but rather some drunken soldiers with a bomb and a stay dog and a fucked up sense of humor.
It was a serious Soviet military program. The dogs were trained to run under tanks.
A dog can run much further than a soldier can throw, which was pretty much the point. If you're close enough to throw something at an enemy tank, you are typically dead.
I don't think we even need to go as far as the second World War. Animals get shit treatment all day, every day, everywhere. Even if you look at pets, which are supposed to get the best treatment of them all, even they are often mistreated or outright abused. And then we can into other territories like service animals, meat and fur, and lab animals. There's so much horror going on at any moment that I think if we treat one right, that's the exception, not the other way around.
Horses and camels were being used for wars for centuries and they were occasionally killed in action, it is not disgusting at all if you think of it objectively
That’s a better death than Laika got. Laika got put into a cramped box, subjected to 5Gs, and died of heat stroke. Being bombed to death is at least fast.
• glued bags filled with napalm to bats bodies and caged the live bats inside a bomb casing[1];
• used foxes caught in China and Australia whose fur was painted with a radioactive radium paint[2] to have them released on Japanese shores to unleash rampant fear onto the superstitious Japanese;
– the US did it in the name of democracy and freedom of humanity. And when the British procured and euthanasied hundred of rats to fill their bodies with explosives[3], they did it in the name of His Majesty the King and to defend and to save the British Empire.
Granted, the Soviets were the preantepenultimate evil with their anti-tank dogs, and nothing else counts.
[0] «In 1943, U.S. forces considered using armed dogs against fortifications. The aim was for a dog to run into a bunker carrying a bomb, which would then be detonated by a timer. Dogs in this secret program were trained at Fort Belvoir. The dogs, called "demolition wolves", were taught to run to a bunker, enter it, and sit while waiting for a simulated explosion. Each dog carried a bomb strapped to its body in canvas pouches, as with the Russian method» – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog#Use_by_other_cou...
[1] «The bat bomb was conceived by Lytle S. Adams (1881-1970), a dental surgeon from Irwin, Pennsylvania who was an acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt […] In his letter, Adams stated that the bat was the "lowest form of animal life", and that, until now, "reasons for its creation have remained unexplained". He went on to espouse that bats were created "by God to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence, and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life." Of Adams, Roosevelt remarked, "This man is not a nut. It sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth looking into» – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb#cite_note-Couffer-4
[2] «The United States Radium Corporation provided an answer in the form of its glow-in-the-dark paint, which contained radium. The health risks associated with the paint weren’t unknown. As early as 1917, women detailing watch dials with the luminous paint suffered from anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw, a result of them using their pursed lips to shape the contaminated brush tips into a fine point. Despite that danger, the OSS continued with Operation Fantasia» – https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unsuccessful-wwii-plo...
[3] «But the most exotic device was the "explosive rat". A hundred of the rodents were procured by an SOE officer posing as a student needing them for laboratory experiments. The rats were skinned, filled with plastic explosive, and sewn up. The idea was to place a rat among coal beside a boiler. When they were spotted, they would immediately be thrown on to the fire, causing a huge explosion» – https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/oct/27/richardnortontayl...