Four-legged soldiers: the role of animals during the World Wars and beyond

He added that in World War One especially, pigeons served as a form of text messaging for that time, with notes being attached to carrier pigeons, who delivered that message wherever it needed to go.

“These types of things [are things] people [might not] realize just how important and a variety of animals were used,” Miller said.

In horses, you had what Miller called your 18-wheeler truck on the battlefield. For example, during the Battle of Vimy Ridge, soldiers would have a significant amounts of ammunition to pre-position.

“No one really moved around in the daylight because the enemy could see you, so you would move at night,” he said, adding that horses were used for that transport.

However, the living conditions for horses were not necessarily ideal. Miller noted that in some cases horses actually died of exhaustion.

“There’s a colorized picture of the 20^th Battery taking up ammunition and you could only get eight bullets on a horse, four on each side so you’d travel for an hour or hour and a half and drop off your eight bullets and say, ‘I’ll be back with another batch’. If you had to deliver one-thousand bullets before a battle, that’s a lot of trips,” he explained.

“They [horses] didn’t always have the proper care; the maintenance of a horse is challenging. From a veterinarian perspective, a horse was allowed to carry say, 700 pounds. Well, instead of making three trips, you might make two trips and load the horse with a bit more ammunition, but that wasn’t really fair to the animal, but that happened. They actually just died of exhaustion – they didn’t get full rest and they didn’t get full rations of their food because it was so short.”

He said that’s a great example of why it’s important to honour and remember those four-legged soldiers who aided Canadians in battle.

Miller added that many ranchers sold their horses for the war effort and in fact, the first number of officers from Lethbridge received special permission from Ottawa to bring their own horses overseas.

“General (John Smith) Stewart was injured, and he had a certain amount of time to recover in the hospital and he found out the person that replaced him really liked his own horse, so General Stewart probably should have stayed in the hospital for a bit more, but if he did he would have lost his command and his horse and that was a big motivator for him saying ‘I’m back now, this is my horse and this is my command’,” Miller told Lethbridge News Now.

He said the loss of a horse during a fight impacted many just as much as the loss of a human soldier.

“There’s one picture of a horse who was killed on the side of the road with a soldier who was cradling the head of that horse and I believe it’s titled ‘Goodbye, Old Friend’ and that picture just evokes the entire emotion, contribution and connection the soldier has with the animal,” Miller remarked.

“They took it just as hard when the horse got killed [to] when the person beside them got killed.”

IN MODERN TIMES

The impact of animals can still be felt in modern times, with dogs playing an integral part in military operations today.

“We talk about the dogs earlier in World War One but [look] how significant dogs are contributing to the military forces today, whether it’s mine-detection, search and rescue,” Miller said.

“That crosses over into the civilian world as well – we have zebra mussels here we’re trying to not get through to Alberta or anywhere in Canada, but dogs are used and trained for that, so not just [in the] military but just the importance of using animals to leverage what we’re trying to do, whatever that mission is.”

by Justin Goulet

Four-legged soldiers: the role of animals during the World Wars and beyond

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