I'm not sure if this interests any of you, but I was going through some old newspaper articles and came across something about animals used in warfare, from bats attached to incindiary devices used in Tokyo by the US, to Kuwaiti Field Chickens (KFC) used by our forces in the Middle East. Then I was reminded of a very interesting article I read in a Psychology course about BF Skinner, a behavioral psychologist who proposed the idea of Pigeon guided missiles for use on battleships in WWII when electronics didn't exist. Skinner used "operant conditioning" to train his pigeons to guide a missile, in which a correct behavior would be connected to a food reward as a response. This is how it worked with pigeons:

The pidgeon had been taught to peck at a picture of a battleship and was rewarded with food when it did so correctly. The viewport of the rocket allowed a view of the ocean once in sight of the enemy ship, at which time the pigeon inside would peck at one of four quadrants on a screen that relayed the information to the back of the missile. The missile would then steer accordingly in the direction that the pigeon specified. Instead of a food reward however, the pigeon was rewarded with a spectacular death! In practice, the pigeon guided missile worked, but the navy stated that they would not place their lives in the hands of a pigeon, so it was never used in actual combat. I don't know about you guys, but I say bring it back! Its both cheap AND effective, and may get rid of those pesky rats with wings once and for all!

the problem with that is that you might have the pigeons accidentally attack your own ships.

haha, it would be funny to see a snake, sparrow, or bat as the central guidance system. Theoretically, since many creatures that are possible for that kind of use respond to operant conditioning it could work, but I hope we're past the stage where we would consider it a serious possibility (my grandfathers team at NASA actually built the Ring Laser Giro's that I believe are still used today?) I wish I had more information on that but at the time it was a "Black" project and my grandfather couldn't say anything to my father besides its name, and even that was 10 years after it was built.

Zeta, although the pigeons are in complete control of the missile after it is in range of the ship, the probability is very low that the pigeon would attack its own ship since it would have to do an entire 180 to do so. The enemies ship would be in the pigeons screen before it was able to steer, and it should do what its trained from there....but who know, maybe a pigeon could get distracted and keep pecking at a certain quadrant until the friendly ship was in view

[edit on 28-12-2004 by zhangmaster]