Now here is a piece of news that will have you rolling in the aisles. Recently, in Egypt a stork was arrested by the authorities on suspicion of spying. The hapless bird was accused of working for some foreign intelligence agency. This was because a prudent fisherman saw some sort of a device stuck to the bird’s leg and assumed it meant for spying. It was later discovered that the device was put on the stork’s leg by French scientists to study the bird’s migratory patterns.
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Even more hilarious than the above mentioned incident is the one that happened in Iran. The authorities arrested 14 squirrels on the suspicion of espionage after they were found lurking around a nuclear facility. All sorts of animals and birds the world over have been accused of spying including a vulture flying over Sudan. It was captured by the Sudanese authorities because it was suspected that the bird was carrying out surveillance for the Israelis.
Accusing animals of espionage is nothing new. During Napoleonic times a monkey was hung in Hartlepool after it was suspected that the creature was French. All these funny stories don’t necessarily mean that animals weren’t actually used for spying. In the early part of the 20th century a camera was tied to a pigeon by a German scientist so it could take aerial photographs. This idea was liked by the German military which decided to adopt it. In fact, as recently as 2007 Chinese scientists have been known to experiment with pigeons by implanting chips in their brains. It is said that this can in turn be used to maneuver the pigeons like airplanes.
During the peak of the Cold War in the 1960s, the CIA was supposedly planning to turn cats into spies by concealing transmitters and microphones in their fur and releasing them in and around Kremlin. The project was abandoned in the trial phase because when a cat was sent to spy on the conversation of two people, it was run over by a cab before it could complete its mission.
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Emily Anthes, who is the author of the book Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts that looks at the experiments carried out by human beings, was quoted as saying “We are heading towards a world in which anyone with a little time, money and imagination can commandeer an animal’s brain.”
