A cat and bird wearing flaming packs attack a city under siege in this illustration from a 1584 artillery manual, or feuerwerkbuch, housed at the University of Pennsylvania.
Posted on 03/16/2014 6:29:43 AM PDT by Renfield
A series of 16th-century manuscripts that have been making waves on the Internet look like a Monty Python version of the Renaissance: They show cats outfitted with flaming backpacks, attacking castles and villages.
But the illustrations are legit. They're intended to show how cats and birds could in theory be used to set fire to a besieged city, according to a University of Pennsylvania scholar.
Mitch Fraas, scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania—the university digitized the manuscripts last year—says that the drawings are from artillery manuals and are accompanied by notes explaining how to use animals as incendiary devices....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
A cat and bird wearing flaming packs attack a city under siege in this illustration from a 1584 artillery manual, or feuerwerkbuch, housed at the University of Pennsylvania.
This 17th-century engraving shows that the idea of using cats as arsonists had staying power and was widespread. PHOTOGRAPH BY MATT ROURKE
“... cats with flaming backpacks...”
The earliest Viking Kitties?!
“Here kitteh kitteh, I mean NOT here. Bad kitteh! Run away!”
They look more like Jet packs to me.
Maybe the cats and birds were used for high speed courier service.
Judges 15:4 (1611 King James Bible)
And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and tooke firebrands, and turned taile to taile, and put a firebrand in the midst betweene two tailes.
Historical accounts of incendiary pigs or flaming pigs were recorded by the military writer Polyaenus[7] and by Aelian.[8] Both writers reported that Antigonus II Gonatas' siege of Megara in 266 BC was broken when the Megarians doused some pigs with combustible pitch or resin, set them alight, and drove them towards the enemy's massed war elephants. The elephants bolted in terror from the flaming, squealing pigs, often killing great numbers of their own soldiers.
Everything old is new again.
Judges 15:3-5
3Samson then said to them, “This time I shall be blameless in regard to the Philistines when I do them harm.”4Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took torches, and turned the foxes tail to tail and put one torch in the middle between two tails.
5When he had set fire to the torches, he released the foxes into the standing grain of the Philistines, thus burning up both the shocks and the standing grain, along with the vineyards and groves.
A precursor of BF Skinner?
My guess is they attacked their enemies with flaming animals.
During WWII, we were gonna drop bombs over Japanese cities that were filled with bats that had little incendiary bombs strapped to them. They believe the plan was cancelled because of the Manhattan Project.
Not sure why they were testing such a thing. The incendiary bombs were were already using were doing one hell(literally) of a job.
Then again, they could have been using part of the technology given to them by “aliens” a millennium ago. I saw it on the History Channel!
"In 1862, during the New Mexico Campaign of the American Civil War a Confederate force approached the ford at Valverde, six miles north of Fort Craig, hoping to cut Union communications between the fort and their headquarters in Santa Fe. About midnight, Union Captain James Craydon tried to blow up a few rebel picket posts by sending mules loaded with barrels of fused gunpowder into the Confederate lines, but the faithful old army mules insisted on wandering back toward the Union camp before blowing to bits. Although the only casualties were two mules, the explosions stampeded a herd of Confederate beef cattle and horses into the Union's lines, so depriving the Confederate troops of some much-needed provisions and horses." link
Did they serve the cooked pigs afterward?
Mmmmmhhhh, Bacon.
The Soviets famously used dogs with bombs strapped to their backs in attempt to destroy German tanks in WW2. They applied Pavlov’s principles by feeding the dogs underneath tanks, then starving thems, so they would run under the panzers in search of food. It was not very successful. First the dogs would refuse to run under the tanks because of the noise of the engines and gunfire and return to the Soviet trenches with their bombs, killing their own handlers. After fixing that problem by feeding the dogs under running tanks, the Russians forgot that their own tanks ran on diesel, but the Germans’ ran on gasoline, so the bomb-dogs, with their keen sense of smell, would run under the same kind they were trained on - diesel.
Symbolic Science FIction perhaps?
Two Idiots Go Ice Fishing
“True Story” [NOT!!] From Michigan, USA.
Guy buys a brand new Grand Cherokee for $30,000+, and has $400.00+ in monthly payments. He’s pretty proud of this rig, and gets a hold of his friend to do some male bonding with the new ride. They go duck hunting and of course all the lakes are frozen.
These two Atomic Brains go to the lake with theiIr guns, the dog, the beer and of course the new vehicle. They drive out onto the ice. Now, they want to make some kind of a natural landing area to attract ducks - something the decoys will float on. Remember it’s all ice, and in order to make a hole large enough to interest a flock of ducks - a hole big enough to entice ducks to land, they needed to use a little more than an ice hole drill...
Sooo, out of the back of the brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee comes a stick of dynamite with a short 40-Second fuse.
Now to their credit, these two rocket scientists DID take into consideration that if they placed the stick of dynamite on the ice at a location far from where they (and the new Grand Cherokee) would be waiting and ran back quickly, they would risk slipping on the ice as they ran from the imminent explosion and could possibly go up in smoke with the resulting blast. After a little deliberation, they come up with the idea of lighting and THROWING the dynamite, which is what they end up doing.
Remember a couple of paragraphs back when I mentioned the vehicle, the beer, the guns AND THE DOG ???? Yes, the dog. The driver’s pet Black Lab (used for retrieving - especially things thrown by the owner) is present and on duty.
You guessed it, the dog takes off at a high rate of doggy speed on the ice, reaching the stick of dynamite with the burning 40 second fuse about the time it hits the ice - all to the woe of the two idiots which are now yelling, stomping, waving arms and wondering what the hell to do now...
The dog is very happy and now heads back toward the “hunters” with the stick of dynamite. I think we all can picture the ever-increasing concern on the part of the brain trust, as the loyal Labrador Retriever approaches. The Bozo’s now are REALLY waving their arms - yelling even louder and generally feeling kinda panicked..
Now finally one of the guys decides to think — something that neither had done before this moment — grabs a shotgun and shoots the dog. This sounds better than it really is, because the shotgun was loaded with #8 duck shot and hardly effective enough to stop the excited lab. The dog DID stop for a moment, slightly confused, but then continued on. Another shot, and this time the dog - still standing, became REALLY confused & of course scared.
Thinking that these two Nobel Prize Winners have gone TOTALLY INSANE, the pooch takes off to find cover with a now extremely short fuse still burning on the stick of dynamite.
The cover the dogs finds? Underneath the brand new Grand Cherokee worth 30-some thousand dollars - the $400.00+ monthly payment vehicle that is sitting nearby on the lake ice.
BOOM !
Dog dies, vehicle sinks to bottom of lake, and these two “Co-Leaders of the Known Universe” are left standing there with this “I can’t EVEN believe this happened to me” look on their faces.
Later, the owner of the vehicle calls his insurance company and is promptly informed that sinking a vehicle in a lake by illegal use of explosives is NOT covered on his policy... He had yet to make his first car payment.
[JOKE- Not a true story]
Ouch—an idea borrowed from Samson?
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