Bombing Around with Cats

The bombing with cats is a difficult matter
As the history of warfare is blurry
First strap on firepower and light with a spatter
And hope toward your foes will it scurry.

My apologies.  But two things came to mind reading this recent article entitled "Cat Bombs More Prevalent Than Previously Thought": the image looks like a spacey sci-fi cartoon from the 1980s (even though it's centuries old), and this is one of the dumber ideas our species has had.

But wait.  They did it with birds, too.

...historian Mitch Fraas at Penn to dig into the global history of the cat bomb image. And you know what he found? MORE CAT BOMBS!

First, Fraas attempted to figure out exactly how the cat/bird bombs were used. The book from which the original illustration was drawn did not contain any information about how to deploy them, though he did end up finding another example of the imagery. This one's from 1590's "Book of instruction for a cannon master":

In the text accompanying the images is a section entitled "To set fire to a castle or city which you can't get at otherwise". This section details how to use doves and cats loaded with flammable devices to set fire to enemy positions. On cats the text paints a grisly picture of attaching lit sacks of incendiaries onto the animals to have them return to their homes and set fire to them. In my awkward translation:

"Create a small sack like a fire-arrow ... if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited."

Even more amazingly, Fraas discovered animal bombs reaching even farther into history than medieval Germany. A mid-20th century Finnish scholar named Pentii Aalto found "examples of incendiary-bearing cats and birds from a 3rd c. BCE Sanskrit text, the Russian Primary Chronicle, early Scandinavian sources, and an early modern history of Genghis Khan."

Catnipped.