The Week Humanity Declared War on Emus, Molasses, and Gravity

In 1932, farmers in Australia were dealing with approximately 20,000 emus eating crops and walking through fences as if the fences had been put there for decoration. The government sent soldiers with machine guns, because apparently this was considered a reasonable agricultural policy.

The escalation began when the emus refused to cooperate with the concept of being shot. They scattered into smaller groups, moved quickly, and proved difficult targets even for trained men. One early attempt reportedly used nearly 1,000 rounds and killed only a few dozen birds. The soldiers tried again, with similar results and less enthusiasm.

The punchline is that the operation was soon abandoned, while the emus remained in possession of the countryside. A military report later described them as having “evaded” the army. Australia had, briefly and officially, lost a war to a bird.

In 1959, a mosquito-control campaign in Borneo used DDT to suppress malaria. The chemical did its job, then continued through the food chain, where it poisoned cats and allowed the rat population to flourish. This created the sort of administrative problem that begins with public health and ends with someone asking whether the Royal Air Force has a crate suitable for a house cat.

The solution was Operation Cat Drop. Thousands of cats were sent into the affected areas by parachute, with the widely reported total reaching roughly 14,000 animals. The cats were delivered in containers designed to keep them from becoming airborne luggage before the appropriate moment.

The punchline is that the cats were deployed as pest-control specialists, making this one of the few military-style operations in which the troops presumably spent most of their time ignoring orders and looking for fish.

Then there was the Boston molasses flood of 1919. A storage tank ruptured and released more than two million gallons of molasses into the streets, sending a sticky wave through the waterfront district. The flood killed 21 people, injured around 150, damaged buildings, and trapped horses so thoroughly that survivors reportedly compared them to drowning insects.

The cleanup took weeks, and molasses was tracked across streets, trains, shoes, and public buildings. The punchline is that residents claimed they could smell it for months afterward, which is the sort of civic souvenir no tourism bureau has ever put on a postcard.

This Week in Weird History: Australia lost a war to emus, Borneo air-dropped cats, and Boston briefly became a syrup-based disaster zone.