10 Times Animals Changed History 

Far more than mere bystanders in human history, the furry and feathered friends we share this planet with are woven inextricably into the entirety of our existence. They’ve served as messengers, test subjects, and even soldiers. Animals have never merely plodded alongside us (often without choice or recognition) through history—they’ve shaped it. 

1. Cher Ami the Pigeon
2. Cairo the Dog
3. Dolly the Sheep  
4. The Monkey that Killed King Alexander of Greece
5. Smoky the Dog
6. Jim the Horse
7. Nikola Tesla’s Beloved Pigeon 
8. Laika the Space Dog
9. The Pig that Nearly Started a War

Cher Ami the Pigeon

Major Charles White Whittlesey and roughly 500 members of the US 77th Infantry Division sat trapped by enemy forces in the French Forest of Argonne amid the carnage and chaos of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive (a months-spanning Allied forces military campaign along the Western Front in World War I). They were surrounded by German troops with rapidly diminishing rations of food, water, and ammunition—so Whittlesey turned to the brave birds of the U.S. Army Signal Corps Pigeon Service after multiple troops carrying messages requesting backup were captured or killed. 

With German troops closing in and Allied Forces mistakenly dropping friendly fire on Whittlesey and his troops, a beleaguered Whittlesey sent a male pigeon named Cher Ami to Allied Forces with a message informing them of their location and requesting backup. Cheri Ami was shot down by enemy soldiers shortly after taking flight, just like the two pigeons Whittlesey had tried to send before him. But he miraculously managed to take flight again and reached Allied Forces with Major Whittlesey’s plea—despite being shot clear through the chest, blinded in one eye, and with one leg nearly ripped off. Army medics rushed to save the gravely wounded Cher Ami, but, despite their efforts, the brave bird succumbed to his injuries some months later. 

Cher Ami  is credited with saving the lives of 194 members of Whittlesey’s “Lost Battalion.” He became known as a war hero in the United States and was even posthumously awarded the Animals in War and Peace Medal of Bravery in late 2019. 

Cairo the Dog

On the evening of May 1, 2011, 23 U.S. Navy SEALs alongside a highly trained Belgian Malinois named Cairo descended on Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden’s Pakistani compound. The clandestine military operation, dubbed Operation Neptune Spear, was the culmination of a years-long manhunt undertaken by the United States government to capture Bin Laden after the events of the September 11 terrorist attacks. 

While the SEALs breached the interior of Bin Laden’s highly secured Abbottabad compound, Cairo was charged with securing the base’s perimeter and sniffing out any hidden explosives or passageways. The dog continued to patrol the compound’s borders after the SEALs located and killed Bin Laden; this bought the soldiers critical time to gather any intelligence left in the safe house and make their escape. 

Cairo was nearly 6 years old and on track to retire from the military entirely when he was tapped for Operation Neptune Spear in April 2011. He and his handler, Will Chesney, were sent to North Carolina for weeks of intense training at a reconstruction of Bin Laden’s facility. Chesney adopted Cairo after the dog retired from military service in 2013; Cairo remained his loyal companion until his passing in 2015.

Dolly the Sheep  

Dolly the sheep became an overnight, international celebrity when she was revealed to the public in February 1997. She was the first mammal to be cloned via somatic cell nuclear transfer—a revolutionary cloning technique wherein the nucleus of an adult cell is implanted into an immature egg cell that has had its own nucleus removed to produce a nascent embryo. The experiment was spearheaded by scientists at the Rosalind Institute in Scotland.

Although Dolly was not the first ever animal cloned, as is popularly believed—that particular distinction belongs to the tadpole—her preeminence as the first mammal cloned from an adult cell was indicative of monumental progress in the practice of cloning, even leading some scientists to speculate the practice could someday revive extinct species. The “original” Dolly was euthanized in 2003 after battling severe arthritis and respiratory disease, but her miraculous existence has continued to spark discussions surrounding scientific ethics and the groundbreaking potential of mammalian cloning. 

The Monkey that Killed King Alexander of Greece

King Alexander of Greece was attacked and bitten by a (poorly) domesticated Barbaray macaque during an October 1920 stroll through the expansive grounds of his royal family’s Tatoi Palace. Despite prompt dressing and cleaning of the bites, the Greek king’s wounds soon became infected and quickly turned septic. While doctors debated whether or not to amputate the king’s leg, the infection continued its spread and just weeks later, Alexander was dead. 

Alexander was just 27 years old at the time of his death and did not leave any heirs, opening a massive power vacuum in the increasingly precarious Greek monarchy. Following an election and referendum, Alexander’s father, the previously deposed King Constatine, was reinstated before abdicating the throne again in 1922 after Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War.  

Smoky the Dog

In February 1944, an American soldier stumbled upon a 4-pound Yorkshire Terrier hiding in a deserted foxhole deep in the New Guinea jungle and returned to camp with the pint-sized pup. The terrier was then sold to fellow U.S. soldier William Wynne, who gave her the name Smoky. As Wynne’s devoted companion, Smoky completed a dozen combat missions and was even awarded eight battle stars for her service in the South Pacific. 

Smoky survived more than a hundred air raids throughout her service. Wynne even credited her with saving his own life by warning him of an incoming bombing while aboard a transport ship. In addition to providing entertainment and comfort to injured troops in hospitals across the South Pacific, Smoky was a crucial component in the construction of a critical Allies airbase located on the Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines. She helped run a stretch of telegraph wire through a claustrophobic, 70-foot pipe—saving hundreds of soldiers from risk of exposure to bombing by cutting a days-spanning project down to just a few minutes. 

After returning from battle in 1945, Wynne and Smoky became a sensation, making more than 40 television appearances together and never once repeating a trick. The duo spent the next 10 years traveling across the country to varying television appearances and veteran’s hospitals. Smoky passed away at approximately 14 years old in early 1957. Posthumously, the pup has been credited as the first recorded therapy dog and helped spark a renewed interest in the Yorkshire Terrier breed. 

Jim the Horse

During the late 19th century, German physiologist Emil von Behring and Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburō uncovered a diphtheria antitoxin developed from the blood plasma of horses. Diphtheria, a serious bacterial infection targeting the respiratory system, was a very common, very deadly disease that killed one in every 10 children infected prior to the antitoxin’s development. Diphtheria mortality plummeted when the antitoxin became widely available around the turn of the century before being functionally eradicated by the development and dissemination of a preventative vaccine. 

Nonetheless, before the development of a vaccine in 1923, doctors relied on antitoxin harvested from horses to treat the infection. One such horse, a retired milk wagon stallion named Jim, produced more than 7 gallons of antitoxin before being diagnosed with tetanus and euthanized in 1901. After Jim’s death, it was discovered his antitoxin had been contaminated with tetanus and administered to 13 juvenile patients, resulting in their deaths.

The first federal regulations for biopharmaceuticals were then passed in an effort to mitigate instances of such contamination. This led to the formation of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in 1902, and later the Food and Drug Administration in 1906. 

Nikola Tesla’s Beloved Pigeon 

Famed Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla may have been a lifelong bachelor, he did have one great love in his life: a pigeon. Though Tesla believed any romantic or sexual entanglements would only serve to distract from his scientific work, the eccentric inventor harbored a deep love of pigeons. He fed them in the park daily and coaxed them into his residences at posh hotels across New York City throughout his life. 

After a particularly striking white pigeon began visiting the inventor daily, he reportedly stated, “I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her there was purpose to my life.” In 1922, Tesla told friends that the beloved bird flew to his room to tell him she was dying, emitting a great white light from her eyes before passing away. He also said that  he felt his life’s work was finished after the pigeon’s passing. 

Tesla’s career continued its precipitous decline and the once-renowned inventor spent much of the remainder of his life destitute and self-secluded. Following years of financial instability and a seriously diminishing public reputation, Tesla, now well into his eighties, died at the Hotel New Yorker on January 7, 1943, after suffering coronary thrombosis.  

Laika the Space Dog

After being plucked from the streets of Moscow as a stray, a husky-spitz mix nicknamed Laika (Russian for “barker”) would become the first living creature to successfully orbit the Earth. She was chosen as the Sputnik II spacecraft’s lone passenger due to her docile nature. Laika underwent extensive space training and conditioning before making her one-way journey to outer space. Laika, who was expected to perish on her journey into Earth’s orbit, was packed inside the Sputnik II’s diminutive cockpit alongside just a few days worth of food and water before launching into space on November 3, 1957. 

While conflicting reports have been given on precisely how and when Laika died, it’s likely she passed from overheating after just a few orbits around the Earth. Sputnik II continued to orbit the Earth for five months before disintegrating while reentering the atmosphere. In honor of Laika’s memory, a statue of the canine cosmonaut was erected at the Russian space training center in Star City. 

The Pig that Nearly Started a War

In June 1859, Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer living on Washington’s San Juan Island, shot and killed a pig belonging to Irishman Charles Griffin after he’d discovered the animal rooting through his vegetable garden. Griffin, an employee of Hudson’s Bay Company (a British trading conglomerate overseeing operations on the island), demanded compensation for the pig from Lyman—who refused on the basis that the pig was on his land. 

Tensions between British and American colonizers had begun to percolate almost immediately once American settlers began arriving on the island in the mid-19th century. Lyman’s shooting of Griffin’s pig nearly sparked a full blown war between the Americans and British, largely due to the differing American and British interpretations of the Oregon Treaty (a British–American agreement delineating territory borders in the Pacific Northwest). 

After British authorities threatened to arrest Lyman, the U.S. Army sent Captain George Pickett and a few dozen soldiers to San Juan Island to offer defense for the American settlers. The British, interpreting this as an act of aggression, responded in turn by sending three Royal Navy ships to San Juan; the U.S. then answered this by dispatching hundreds more troops to join Pickett’s ranks. President James Buchanan sent U.S. Army General Winfield Scott to negotiate terms with Sir James Douglas, Governor of the short-lived Colony of British Columbia, in a desperate bid to avoid all out war. After agreeing to share military control of San Juan Island in 1859, the U.S. was granted full control of the island by Wilhelm I of Germany in 1872.

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