Dogs like to get up to mischief, from shoving kids in the Seine to *checks notes* even sparking international conflicts. At least, that’s what is said to have happened in 1925 when an errant pooch began what has become known as the “War Of The Stray Dog” after its owner chased it over enemy lines and got shot.
It was a small infraction, but one that occurred at an inopportune time as the situation between Greece and Bulgaria in the 20th century was tense. They had been beefing over who got to take ownership of Macedonia, which is where the peculiar tale of the War Of The Stray Dog begins.
It was October 1925, and a Greek soldier was stationed at the border between Bulgaria and Macedonia. As one version of the story goes, disaster struck when his dog ran off in the direction of Bulgarian territory, crossing from Macedonia into the town of Petrich and prompting the soldier to follow suit. He chased the dog across enemy lines and was promptly shot by the opposition for breaching Bulgarian territory.
Like many tales of old, the details are scant, and some say that the infraction actually occurred due to Bulgarians crossing the border and shooting two Greek soldiers. According to the 1925 newspaper The Barrier Miner, whatever went down left the Greek side outraged as they put forward an ultimatum, stating if their demands weren’t promptly met, they would advance into Bulgaria and occupy Petrich.
More bloodshed ensued, by which point the League Of Nations waded in to state that Greece was wrong to have occupied the Bulgarian town. Only after more than 50 people had died did they comply with the ruling, withdrawing their forces and paying a fine of £45,000, says Dr Stavros Boinodiris in his book Andros Odyssey: Liberation.
A war of a most peculiar origin, but it would only be one of the strangest of its time for a mere seven years before an even weirder conflict kicked off on the other side of the planet. When 20,000 emus stormed western Australia as part of their breeding season activities, they became a menace for which the Australian Minister of Defense was not prepared. According to a newspaper report, the “emus soon began to improve their own understanding of the science of warfare.”
Going after emus with machine guns and fighting humans over dog walks all might seem to be pushing it when it comes to the phrase “all is fair in love and war,” but if you go back even further than the 1900s, things get much worse. From scorpion bombs to weaponizing sick donkeys, ancient warfare got really weird.
