Dogs.

This is coolbert:

Not so long ago there was a web site called "Dog O' War".

Advertised "for sale" a "war dog". This was a web site [now taken off the web] for a business run by two convicts doing life. These miscreants had come into $100,000 from a prison law suit and decided to invest the money by breeding and selling to drug dealers a "war dog".

This would be a cross between a Presa Canario and a Pit Bull. Breed a very big and mean dog that could very well kill a person with ease. And they were successful in the breeding. They bred these dogs but they became uncontrollable. Killed sheep and then a person in a famous case in San Francisco. End of story. Click here to see a site showing the Presa Canario and describing it.

Dogs have been used in warfare probably as long as people have been waging war.

Today dogs are used by militaries all over the world as sentry dogs, guard attack dogs, sniffer and scout dogs, etc.

But not normally as attack war dogs in battle. We are talking here about something totally different. A dog that actually participates in battle, along with the troops. Is supposed to charge pell mell into the enemy and cause casualties. These are the dogs that are pictured as having the spiked collars around their necks so they cannot be choked. The idea was to have a whole bunch of these war dogs attack the enemy and have them break formation to deal with the dogs. Create a gap or diversion that would allow the human troops an opening to exploit. And this was done by cultures and militaries over the centuries. For instance:

"Some scholars believe it was the Hyksos (the mysterious invaders of Egypt who ruled from Avaris in the Delta) who popularised the use of spike-collared dogs in war."

"Mastiffs were used as war-dogs by the armies of the Caesars, and they were also found within the battle groups of Alexander the Great and his generals."

"Atilla the Hun, used giant Molossian dogs, precursors of the mastiff, and Talbots, ancestors of the bloodhound, in his campaigns."

"In 1988, the Israeli Special Forces sent bomb carrying Rottweilers on a suicide mission, code named "Blue and Brown," against enemy bunkers in Lebanon.

"But it was initially during the days of the Roman Empire, that entire formations of attack dogs, frequently equipped with armour or spiked collars were sent into battle against the enemy as a recognized and effective instruments of offensive warfare."

"the Romans used the heavy Mastiffs with armored collars to attack their enemies in the legs, thus forcing them to lower their shields;"

And as for the Israel use of combat dogs:

"Operation "Blue and Brown"

"The operation's multi-goal was first, to kill Ahmed Jibril, the head terrorist leader of the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command), and secondly take out his various headquarters, deep inside Lebanon.

Most of the PFLP-GC headquarters, were located in caves, situated on high buffs, off the Lebanonese coast. IDF staff decided that it would be impossible to take them out by air assault...ground assault was the only way!

Several units were involved in the raids: Shayetet 13 (Navy Commandos), Sayeret Golany (Special Forces) and Palga Terror's dogs, from Unit 7142.

A high casuality rate was expected!


Palga Terror

The plan called for Flotilla 13 to clear the beach, and for the Sayerets to get the Palga Terror Unit close enough to the targets, so that they could release their dogs, who were carrying packs, containing C4 remote control explosives.

The dogs were to enter the caves and explode, killing all the terrorist inside, but like everything else, in the blue and brown operation, the dogs didn't do what they were suppose to.

Some didn't go were they were told; some of the explosives went off prematurely; and some didn't explode at all. Four of the dogs, Rottweilers, were killed immediately by the terrorists."

This was the Israeli operation to use dogs laden with explosives to enter terrorist caves, whereupon the explosives would be detonated.

Now, the above has a precedent. During World War Two the Soviets trained dogs to attack tanks. Dogs with explosives strapped to them would be trained to run underneath a tank when they saw one. The dogs had wires sticking up from their explosive packs that would set off a grazing fuse when the wire touched the bottom of the tank. The tank would be destroyed in the process and of course the dog would be killed too! The problem with this method was that the dogs could not differentiate between a German tank and Soviet tank, and so they endangered the Soviets as well as the Germans. For this reason, the project was scrapped.

And finally, during the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, the forces of Cortez [Cortez translates as courtesy by the way] made good use of war dogs. The descriptions by the Aztecs of these war dogs is most indicative of the fear they created. According to the Aztecs:

"Their dogs are great monsters with flat ears and long tongues which hang out."

"Their dogs are enormous, with flat ears and long, dangling tongues. The color of their eyes is a burning yellow; their eyes flash fire and shoot off sparks. Their bellies are hollow, their flanks long and narrow. They are tireless and very powerful. They bound here and there panting, with their tongues hanging out. And they are spotted like an ocelot."

Now, after the conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, a most terrible practice was engaged in the conquistadores on their Indian subjects. This was the practice of "dogging". A dog on a chain is put into an arena with an unarmed Indian and the two fight. The dog almost always winning and killing the Indian. This was done for "sport". Wood cuts were done of this "sport" and show a grinning Spaniard watching his hound chase down an Indian.

"One favorite sport of the conquistadors was "dogging." Traveling as they did with packs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that were raised on a diet of human flesh and were trained to disembowel Indians, the Spanish used the dogs to terrorize slaves and to entertain the troops. An entire book, Dogs of the Conquest, has been published recently, detailing the exploits of these animals as they accompanied their masters throughout the course of the Spanish depredations. "A properly fleshed dog," these authors say, "could pursue a 'savage' as zealously and effectively as a deer or a boar.... To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to pursue and rip apart their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts."

Whoa boy!!

Such was the birth of the present Mexico. Mr. "Courtesy" was not so courteous!!

coolbert.