For horses, mules and donkeys, the distance between their eyes and nose left some blinded during poison gas attacks.īirds presented an even bigger problem - how do you fit the large human respirator onto a small bird? The shallow covering of the human mask could not protect a dog’s sensitive ears. Troops wrapped straps around the noses of pack animals, or squeezed dogs’ faces into the soft baggy masks they used for themselves. Animal gas masksīefore animals received customized gas masks, many soldiers simply attached human masks. And when it came to covering up, all sides of the war attempted to protect their vital animal assets. In a gas attack, troops had to save their own lives before they could cover up their more vulnerable animal brethren. They didn’t have the autonomy of their human comrades, either. They typically received less food than the soldiers and worked to exhaustion. The front lines were hard enough for their human masters, but the animals were acutely sensitive to chemical warfare. To counter the pigeons, the Germans trained hawks to hunt them and retrieve their messages. They were so important as messengers that pilots would even carry them to call home if they found themselves stranded behind enemy lines. Around 100,000 birds carried messages back and forth from the front with a success rate of more than 95 percent. Carrier pigeons were the most reliable communications tool in the war. Homing pigeons carried out a crucial mission in the conflict. In a less formal way, dogs improved morale within the trenches by hunting rats and acting as companions to troops in miserable conditions. Their small size helped them slip over and between trenches to deliver messages, shuttle medical supplies or lay down communication wires. Some dogs pulled heavy machine guns on trolleys, others used their keen sense of smell and hearing for sentry and scout work. The Germans used some 30,000 dogs on the Western Front, and the Entente kept around 20,000. (The Germany army would remain majority horse-drawn through World War II.)īetween 19, gas hospitalized 2,200 horses and killed 211, mostly because logistical uses limiting their exposure to the more dangerous areas at the front. The railways that carried the millions of tons of food and ammunition to the rear were frequently several miles away, so horses, mules and donkeys bridged the gap even after engineers set up light railway and automobile supply lines. Pack animals carried supplies and weapons on the front and rear lines. Animals were important companions and workers to the soldiers at the front, and like their human compatriots they needed protection from the perils of chemical warfare.

Everyone knows the enormous human cost of the conflict, but it is easy to forget the fates of the million of animals that supported the war on all sides. More than eight million horses, mules and donkeys and a million dogs died in World War I. What’s more, thanks to their natural abilities, slugs would actually survive the attacks unscathed - which is more than could be said for every other animal on the Western Front. They would compress their bodies and temporarily stop breathing, alerting soldiers to the danger and giving them enough time to pull on their gas masks. Three times more sensitive than humans, slugs reacted to mustard gas at one particle per 10-12 million. Army was the first to discover the slug’s life-saving secret. Slugs were far more effective than dogs at detecting incoming mustard gas attacks. However, there was one other tiny gas-detecting hero on the Western Front - the slug.

Horse gas mask