As a society we’re all very used to seeing seeing-eye dogs guiding the blind, sheepdogs helping farmers, and red squirrels performing minor surgical procedures to help reduce the NHS backlog. However, readers may well be less well familiar with some of the other animals have been trained to support human society around the world and throughout history. Hopefully, this treatise will help eliminate such fauna ignorance.
In Ancient Mesopotamia there are cuneiform records of goats being used to exfoliate cattle. The early farmers learnt that cows whose pores were unclogged gave far greater milk yields and yet the process of massaging such thick skinned ungulates was impossible to sustain over long periods for human hands, leading to terrible callouses, and also taking them away from their favourite hobby of reading the latest Gilgamesh comic. Consequently, they hit upon the idea of training goats to walk and stamp upon the cattle to keep their pores open. This practice remained for a good thousand years through the rise and fall over several empires in the region, and was only eventually brought to an end by Alexander the Great who found it ‘creepy’.
Moths were trained in Ancient Rome to fold napkins.
In Tudor England, weevils were used to fill in tax-forms. The weevils would be dipped in iron gall ink and coaxed across forms through a combination of stale biscuits and lute music. The tune played and the biscuit provided depended on the nature of the form that needed to be filled out. The record of the precise combinations used are sadly lost, but it is known that ‘Greensleeves’ and the equivalent of a ginger nut were responsible for the Earl of Bedford being executed for embezzlement.
Steller’s Seacow became extinct as it was used by early sailors to deliver messages to their insurance brokers who would misinterpret the engorged sirenians as a savage satirical comment on their commission rates. As most of the sailors’ brokers were based in major European cities, the seacows wouldn’t survive the journeys back to their kelp fields in the Bering Sea. Post-extinction, mallards were used until the invention of the postage stamp.
Geese were trained to be hostage negotiators in Ottawa. The practice eventually was abandoned when analysts realised a disproportionately high number of kidnappers were demanding seed and a deconstruction of the French pate industry.
It’s well known that dolphins have been used to locate sea-mines and defuse them for the US Navy. Less well known is the US Navy’s attempt to commercialise dolphins’ locating skills domestically, renting them out to civilians to find house-keys and TV remote controls. Citizens were told to carry a dolphin under the right arm, and the creature would increase or decrease its rate of clicking depending on how close to the lost object they had become. The impracticality of the process eventually stopped the practice when a three year-old bottle nosed dolphin called Biscuits became lodged in an ombudsman’s lint filter.
In the Lucerne region of Switzerland, it has been the practice since 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia for trackers or ‘Schmetterlingskämpfer’ (in the local tongue) to use butterflies to hunt for liquorice. This liquorice is woven by Liquorice Witches or ‘Lakritzhexen’ and hidden beneath pinecones on hilltops or in dense forests. These Lakritzhexen of course are the basis for the Grimm Brothers’ tale of Hansel and Gretel, though the tale paints the witches in a far worse light than they actually are – selfishness rather than infanticide is their main sin. The Schmetterlingskämpfer trackers tie a cotton thread (or in the 17th century, a thread of spider’s webbing) to the hind leg (‘Hinterbein’) of the grizzled skipper butterfly (Pyrgus malvae to its friends), and the scent of liquorice is introduced to it via the back of a leather thong which has been soaked in liquorice essence. The butterfly then cavorts and sets off like a fluttery shot in pursuit of the same scent elsewhere, the Schmetterlingskämpfer trailing in its wake. The liquorice, when found, is packaged quaintly and sold to tourists or used in the exhumation process of mummified badgers. The 1867 two Swiss centime stamp had a picture of Klaus Kurzkohl the legendary Schmetterlingskämpfer and his butterfly, Rudi, on it, and such reverence of the butterfly trackers and their butterflies in Lucerne is not uncommon, with Panini’s ‘Schmetterlingskämpfer 2024’ being their most successful sticker album in Switzerland ever.
Cardinals in the Roman Catholic tradition have a family of mice living in their cassocks that nibble away any sins that are caught in the fabric, in the same way that remora fish clean sharks or oxpeckers clean hippos. In fact, the tradition arose from Saint Augustine of Hippo who both lived in Hippo and was obsessed with hippos. He spent a lot of his later life submerged amongst the giant mammals having besmeared his torso in their dung to mask his human smell. In the evening, isolated in his priestly cell, Augustine would find himself riddled with rodents, attracted by the rotting faecal matter – in the morning, post-rodent gnawing, he would be significantly cleaner and ready to cover himself in hippo dung again. It was seen by his fellow clergy as symbolic of God removing his sins and him being born anew and afresh.
The rodents used by cardinals are known now as peccata rodentes. New cardinals take a few weeks to settle into having a dozen live mice running about the innards of their garments, and so often appear twitchy in public. In fact, back in the eighth century, a rogue incident where many of the cardinals had brought sesame seeds to the conclave after the death of Pope Zachary meant that the peccata rodentes went bonkers and the cardinals accidently elected Stephen II. Fortunately, Stephen II died before he was consecrated (heart attack due to excessive rodent-based trauma), and instead he was replaced by Stephen II – so, no harm done really.
In 1732, Cardinal Giuseppe Delmonte was defrocked by his fellow cardinals, who suspected his conduct wasn’t that befitting of his position when a dozen peccata rodentes dropped dead from his undergarments because of severe obesity.
Snakes have been used since 1842 in the laying of standard gauge railway track (1435mm wide). The average length of an adder is about 70cm. Left addermen (or laddermen) and right addermen (or raddermen) would grip the adders and hold them width ways so their heads met in the middle to ensure that the tracks were the right length apart as they were being laid. The third man in the team, the double headed adderman (or double hadderman) checked that the heads just touched. He tended to get bitten – and until 1872 when they first gave the double haddermen thick elbow-length gloves and some goggles it was considered the most dangerous job in the Empire, narrowly beating Queen Victoria’s wet nurse in a poll in The Times.
In mainland Europe they use the non-venomous aesculapian snake (zamenis longissimus) which also has the advantage of being 1.4m long and therefore requiring only a single operative to carry out measuring.
Here is a transcript of an interview carried out with two addermen from a 1957 edition of the local BBC programme ‘Norfolking Way’ in which we get an insight into the tradition:
Adderman 1: I dun brought mun adder, Betsy. She be un left adder, un Clarence here dun brought Clive who be hims right adder as he be a radderman.
Adderman 2: Fur five n twenty yars.
Adderman 1: Aye, fur five n twenty yars.
Adderman 2: Clive be mun third adder, afer Cyril.
Adderman 1: Oh Cyril were un fine right adder.
Adderman 2: Damn fine radder – straight as an rod e could go. We dun dun from Norwich to Ipswich with Cyril.
Adderman 1: Immaculate.
Adderman 2: True.
Adderman 1: Mun previous, Clara.
Adderman 2: Bloody awful.
Adderman 1: Bloody awful ladder – kept bending.
Adderman 2: Couldn’t keep her straight.
Adderman 1: That’s why there’s a kink outside Sudbury.
Adderman 2: Clara kept bending.
Adderman 1: Kept bending. Couldn’t measure bugger all. Had to double-up Clive. That’s no blood use, using a radder as a ladder. Track ended up all on the huh.
Adderman 2: Accident black-spot.
Adderman 1: It’s a train accident black-spot now, all cos of a bent radder.
Cost cuts in the West End post-Covid means that theatres have trained bichon frisés to be understudies in most major productions. A ten year-old dog called Lady Fluffingtons deputised for Sir Ian MacKellan as Falstaff after he fell off the stage, and did such a good job that Sir Ian extended his convalescence allowing the dog to tour the provinces whilst he ate hob-nobs and wrote the first draft of his memoir ‘Gadding with Gandalf’.
Clerical horses have been doing general admin for the Department for Works and Pensions (or its equivalent) since 1947 when Clement Atlee signed into law the Equine Filing Law. Which explains a lot.
It is a matter of public record that the late Lady Diana, Queen of Hearts, used to play croquet with flamingos and hedgehogs. And this is not the only time royalty has utilised animals to play sport. Horses for polo, trap and four-man bobsleigh, obviously, but did you realise that Princess Margaret played darts with stunned woodpeckers? Or that Henry VIII used the tears of sea otters to grease his balls when playing lacrosse? Thomas Cromwell insisted that this was cheating, which led to his execution and his family’s famous grudge against the monarchy.
Caterpillars were trained in the Weimar Republic to remove the filling from strudels without disturbing the pastry latticework. Because there is no substance on Earth hotter than the filling of an apple strudel, the caterpillars were bred with asbestos. The practice was prevalent across Germany until recently when no-one could remember why they’d been training caterpillars to remove the filling of a strudel to just leave the latticework pastry.
In the more rural areas of the Peruvian Andes, guinea pigs have been used to light nocturnal paths for tradesmen wishing to shift their wares during the night to avoid VAT. The guinea pigs are smeared with a vivid yellow salsa huancaina (which is also a national dish), and have been taught to shuffle between villages. The guinea pigs consequently glow in the dark, and a combination of hunger and financial greed drives tradesmen to follow them with their goods. Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to train a guinea pig, particularly one you’ve smeared in a mild pepper sauce, and so most tradesmen fail to get anywhere near their intended destination and over a dozen are lost every year tumbling down sheer precipices trying to run after furious sweet-scented rodents.
Ever since the first Oktoberfest in Munich back in 1810 to celebrate the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen, local Benedictine monks have been using the Agile Frog (Rama dalmatina) to help guide drunken-revellers back safely to their abodes. The monks chose frogs rather than the traditional hound as they felt the erratic leaping of the frog was more attuned to the drunken wayward stumblings of an intoxicated merrymaker. The monks stood amongst the throngs, clasping an aerated box full of agile frogs and would shout “Wer braught einen Frosch, um nach Hause zu kommen?“ or “Holen Sie sich einen Froschfūhrer!“, encouraging inebriated roisterers to claim a frog. The monks, using Latin the holiest of languages, would chant the drunkards address to the frog, tie a piece of strings around the torso of the frog and the customer and let nature take its course. So successful was this scheme and now so engrained into German culture that the witty exchange “Was he drunk?“, “Let’s just say a frog had to take him home.“ appears in 90% of German TV sitcoms.
Treatises of Gloria 