The War Mongers

            Australia is known for their extremely manly men. You have Steve Irwin as an example, a guy who fought freaking crocodiles and wasn't afraid of anything. Along with dangerous men in Australia, you have the animals. Jokes are always made that everything in Australia has specifically evolved to kill humans, but its semi-true, you have to be careful where you walk in the giant war zone of a country. Extremely venomous jellyfishes and octopi roam the waters while drop-bears; poisonous snakes and spiders creep around the mainland. Most manly men in Australia keep their distance from these demons because if they don’t, they will kill you like they did Steve Irwin who died to a stingray piercing him in the heart. There is another time the manly men of the Aussie nation fought back and lost embarrassingly.

            They went to war against emus. That’s right emus. Not the deadly animals that roam the streets of Sydney, they went to war against a large bird. An emu is similar to an ostrich, just a bit shorter.  Although emus can be aggressive sometimes, they are not as extremely dangerous as every other animal in that God-Forsaken place. So why would the good people of Australia go to war against these birds you ask, well over 20,000 emus chomped down all the crops of Australian farmers. In the 1930s, after another bad year of crops, the government decided to intervene by literally going to war against the birds. Machine guns and other advanced technological weapons from this era were being used, that’s right machine guns.

            Now a technologically advanced military is hunting down 20,000 birds that keep eating farmers’ crops. You think to yourself, oh this will be an easy slaughtering of FLIGHTLESS birds right? Wrong. The first attempt at killing emus failed terribly, after days of searching, the solders finally found about 1,000 birds. They round ‘em up and fire, but the guns jam and all the emus scatter. Along with this failed mission, many other missions follow leading to about 50 emus being killed over the course of a week. Emus 1, Solders 0. The military left with their heads low and the emus continued their rampage over the land.

            About another week later, after more complaints from farmers, the military comes back with their big heavy guns. Yet again the solders find little success. Killing about 50 in the first few days.  By the time the military was finished with the dim-witted war, the emu’s side suffered about 900 casualties. The military leaves feeling a little bit better about itself. 

            The media always seems to like making fun of the government, so the name Emu wars, where machine guns lost to a bunch of birds, was born.  Over the years, emus continue to ravage Australian farms, but now the government just ignores it, so they don’t have to fight the emus again.