by Maeve O'Connell (7th)
In 1932, Australia found itself at war. It wasn’t against another continent, and it wasn’t against themselves. It was against the emus.
The emus would migrate to the west area of Australia, and although wheat prices were down at the time, it was still a major issue for the farmers with land up there. After the first sign of being threatened by the humans, the emus broke into small groups and scattered, making it difficult to solve the issue in one fell swoop as was intended.
The Australians should have been able to solve their problem when they managed to get a large group of emus relatively close to them, but their weapons jammed up, and only several were killed. (Seriously guys, come on.)
Even the soldiers were impressed by the emus, because they had a shocking ability to survive bullet wounds. It’s truly sad that a wild animal would be a better soldier than humans themselves.
Although the emu is one of Australia’s national animals, that had no evident impact on their willingness to attack them. The same goes for kangaroos.
Needles to say, the emus won the war. It only took six days for their fabulous birdness to intimidate the Australians into surrender. All of the attempts to decrease the emu population were fruitless, and although several plans were developed, none of them were successful.
Soldiers stopped the attacks on the emus on the sixth day, and when they requested more soldiers, they were refused. A bounty was put up for the death of an emu, but this had little effect. (That’s not all that shocking, who would want to kill an emu?)
Recently, efforts for putting up fencing were put into action, but can anything really stop an emu in action?
Image Credit:
"Emu Face." San Diego Zoo. Accessed 13 May 2024. https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/sites/default/files/inline-images/emu_face.jpg