In 1932 the Australian government deployed three artillerymen to Western Australia. There were two Lewis machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition for the purpose of killing twenty thousand birds - but the mission was a failure.
A Decade Stacked Against Farmers
The birds are emus, which are large animals that cannot fly and live naturally in Western Australia. To understand the context, the previous ten years were difficult for the local farmers. After the First World War, the government settled veterans on small pieces of low quality land - this land was difficult to use for growing wheat successfully. In 1922 the government changed the legal status of emus from protected animals to pests, because the birds walk over crops and destroy fences during their movements. Due to a drought ten years later, approximately twenty thousand emus moved into the specific farming areas where the veterans lived. As the farmers required assistance, the government ordered the military to intervene.
A Quick Task, They Assumed
On November 2, the three soldiers reached the area with two machine guns. It was their expectation that the task would conclude in a short amount of time. Emus are not animals that remain stationary when people shoot at them. They run in different directions as soon as the firing of guns begins. And they divide into small clusters where one bird acts as a sentry to alert the group when a threat is near.
Faster Than the Men Who Chased Them
On the third day the number of emus that soldiers had killed was approximately thirty - this amount is small when it is compared to the total population of many thousands. During an event where soldiers hid near a water source, the men waited for many birds to arrive at close range. When the men began to shoot, the weapon stopped functioning after a few bullets. The emus moved away quickly. To solve the problem of speed, soldiers placed a gun on a vehicle - but the terrain was uneven, which meant the vehicle could not travel as fast as the birds and one vehicle crashed after hitting an emu during the process. There are different reports regarding the speed of an emu when it is chased, as some people estimate thirty miles per hour and others estimate fifty five miles per hour. As a result the birds moved at higher speeds and adjusted to the environment more effectively than the people who followed them. In a statement, Major Meredith said that the emus were difficult to harm with machine guns, similar to armored vehicles.
Giving Up the Direct Fight
By changing the method from a direct attack to other strategies, the government addressed the issue. It was not necessary to use more powerful weapons. Officials provided ammunition to farmers so that they could shoot the birds. To prevent the emus from entering the crops, workers constructed long fences. Those barriers meant farmers no longer needed to hunt the birds inside the fields. According to one report, a system of payments resulted in the death of fifty seven thousand emus over six months. This task was completed by individual farmers, without a military unit involved. Due to the behavior of the birds, a strategy that is organized to fight a stationary enemy is not effective, because the emus do not stay in a single group or location.
From Pests to Protected
In the century following the conflict, people began to protect the emus instead of hunting them. In 1999, those birds received full legal protection under the environmental laws of Australia, though no emus were present to agree to any such truce.
Still Watching From the Wheat
The transition of the animals from pests to protected wildlife happened slowly, over multiple decades, without any single official ceremony marking the change. For a long time the birds survived after the military ceased using weapons against them. One old newsreel from the era reportedly described the emus moving through the wheat fields like an advancing army, watching the soldiers from behind the stalks of grain. Emus like these, wary and impossible to pin down, are the ones that still live wild across Australia today.