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In the only recorded inter-species war in human history, the humans lost.
Meet the victor. Skinny, leggy, frizzy-haired and feathered, with a long, pale blue neck, buggy amber eyes, and wings too short to fly. Instead, they flap when the emu runs, spindly legs blurring at thirty miles per hour.
Emus may not soar, but they stand tall, often well over six feet, and can last for weeks without food. They are also, it turns out, a dab hand at military strategy. And the outcome of The Great Emu War, waged in 1932 in Western Australia, holds lessons for us still.
First off, the emus were immigrants. To escape drought, they had flocked to two verdant regions of Western Australia, where they proceeded to nibble the wheat crop and destroy the rabbit fencing. Enraged, farmers sought help from the government. The defense minister (later tagged Minister of the Emu War) deployed a company of skilled World War I veterans, the Royal Australian Artillery. Led by Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith of the 7th Heavy Battery, the men were armed with Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Overkill, in other words, intended to swiftly eradicate the “vermin” (the migrants’ new official classification).
In the first skirmish, soldiers spotted a mob (the collective noun for a group of emus, and a convenient justification for violence). The birds stood placidly drinking, well out of firing range. Local settlers tried to herd them into an ambush, but the birds split into small groups and ran in every direction.
Lesson One: Militarization and deportation are not calm, efficient ways to solve migration problems. See also: deportation of poor Irish immigrants 1794; Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Palmer Raids of 1919.)
Later the same day, soldiers found a small flock and managed to kill a dozen or so. Nowhere near the 100 emu skins they had been ordered to collect along the way, so the feathers could be plucked to make hats for light horsemen.
Ah, but two days later, a mob of more than one thousand emus was sighted. Having learned patience, the gun team waited until the birds drifted toward them, then opened fire. Startled, the birds emerged from their dust baths, stopped preening their plumage, and mobilized, scattering as fast as they could.
The machine gun jammed.
Lesson Two: Guns are never the answer. See also: Columbine; Sandy Hook Elementary; Santa Monica; Waco restaurant; Charleston church; Chattanooga military recruitment center; Umpqua Community College; San Bernadino; Kalamazoo Uber; Pulse nightclub; Fort Lauderdale airport; Orlando factory; Plano; Las Vegas music festival; Sutherland Springs church; Parkland High School; Santa Fe High School; Scottsdale; Capital Gazette; Pittsburgh synagogue; Thousand Oaks, California; Ascension and Livingston parishes, Louisiana; Sebring bank; Aurora, Illinois; Dayton, Ohio; Rio Pedras; El Paso; Jersey City; Milwaukee brewery; Williamsburg, West Virginia; Springfield, Missouri; Chicago-Evanston; Muskogee; Atlanta spas; Boulder; Indianapolis FedEx; San Jose; Monterey Park; Half Moon Bay; Michigan State University; The Covenant School; Allen, Texas mall; University of Nevada Las Vegas; Charlottesville; Orlando Halloween; Tuskegee University; Abundant Life Christian School; New Orleans Truck Attack.
Now grimly resolute, the soldiers prepared for a large-scale attack they were sure would increase the kills exponentially. A newsreel had already (prematurely) announced the men’s victory against this “advancing army with keen eyesight…watching events through their periscopes raised up over heads of corn.”
Lesson Three: Fake news comes from haste and bias, not political orientation. See also: “Dewey Defeats Truman,” 1948.
Needing an easy victory to cheer them up, Meredith moved his men farther south, where the emus were “reported to be fairly tame.” Still, the soldiers had little success. The emus squinted at them through the translucent secondary eyelids that keep Australia’s red dust away from their eyes. Then they fled. As ornithologist D.L. Serventy later reported, “the machine-gunners’ dreams of point blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic.”
An Army observer put it this way: “Each pack seems to have its own leader now—a big black-plumed bird which stands fully 1.8 m [six feet] high and keeps watch while his mates carry out their work of destruction and warns them of our approach.” These scout-commanders issued their warnings by drumming, grunting, or booming, sounds impossible for another emu to ignore.
Lesson Four: Solidarity and teamwork can outsmart technology and official force. See also: Underground Railroad; Sanctuary Movement; Jane Collective; current abortion underground.
Frustrated, Meredith mounted one of the Lewis guns on a truck. Alas, the lumbering truck was neither sleek enough nor zippy enough to catch up to the birds, and the ride was so bumpy, the gunners would not have been able to take aim anyway. One emu was killed—martyred, in effect, because the mangled body got caught in the truck’s steering equipment and caused it to veer off and crash into a farmer’s fence.
Lesson Five: Showing off by plowing into territory that is not yours only makes you look silly. See also: Greenland.
By now, 2,500 rounds of ammo had been wasted.
Lesson Six: Bigger is not always better. See also: everything.
Emus are hard to kill: they bleed slowly, they have tough hides, and they have guts—literally. Their intestinal tract fills a huge cavity in their body, making a fatal single shot to a vital organ almost impossible. Also, their shaggy feathers make it hard to discern the outline of the body beneath them.
Lesson Seven: Study up before you shoot. See also: Taliban, Afghanistan; tariffs and economics.
Meredith compared the avian enemy to the Zulus and commended their skill at maneuvering even when badly wounded. “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world,” he announced.
Lesson Eight: Never underestimate opponents who seem weak to you. See also: 9/11/2021, minorities, LGBTQ, women.
Just six days after the war began, Meredith withdrew, exasperated. The Minister of Defense insisted that the military efforts be resumed. A month later, the army reported 986 confirmed kills—with 9,860 rounds of ammunition. It had taken ten machine-gun rounds apiece to kill fewer than 1,000 birds—and 19,000 remained alive. Hardly eradication.
This war was simply too expensive and exhausting to wage, Meredith informed his superiors. Whereupon, according to the Sydney Sunday Herald, the army “ingloriously withdrew to the accompaniment of a tirade of abuse.”
Emus had lost their lives on the battlefield, but they had taken no lives; had not even kicked or clawed the enemy. Meredith’s official report noted that the only casualty to befall his men was the loss of their dignity.
Lesson Nine: Violence is not prerequisite for victory. See also: women’s suffrage; Montgomery bus boycott; Freedom Rides; Pride marches.
The humans ceded the field to the emus, and by military convention, the army that cedes the field loses the battle.
After its ignominious defeat, the Australian government devised a new plan: transforming rabbit fencing into a 135-foot-long super fence, costing $4.2 million in today’s U.S. dollars, to keep the emus away. It would be reinforced and extended from coast to coast in 2019. Many emus have died of starvation or become tangled in the fence. Yet their numbers hold strong.
Lesson Ten: Barriers fail. See also: Berlin Wall; Israel-Gaza anti-tunnel barrier; Mexico-U.S. border wall.
Emu populations are currently thriving in nearly every region in Western Australia.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
