490 R Hediger hard work of military life’ (2011, p 291) Many of these deceased animals became meat for the soldiers Camels saw similar experiences in many wars In World War I, the Palestinians campaigned against the Turks under the direction of General Allenby, who employed 50,000 camels ‘Less than half survived that final year of World War I’ (Kistler 2011, p 280) Similarly, when ‘the exiled ruler of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, led a large force from Sudan to retake Ethiopia’, he used 15,000 camels, only 50 of which survived; ‘the rest died in the forced march’ (Kistler 2011, p 280) Modern war is rife with animals suffering and dying at such massive scales Or consider the case of pigeons, often used as messengers in war, a relationship that goes well back in time In modern wars, pigeons remained useful Kistler reports, for instance, that ‘96 % of messages sent by pigeon in World War I arrived in a timely fashion’ (2011, p 248) In World War II, the single year 1942 saw the British Royal Air Force use ‘nearly 500,000 pigeons’ (Kistler 2011, p 251) Such vast involvement helped to inspire the celebration of a particularly effective individual bird, Winkie, the pigeon awarded the first Dickin Medal, a British prize that celebrates the acts of animals in war (Kistler 2011) Wartime pigeon success, however, led to countermeasures: ‘Nazis used trained hawks to kill pigeons’ (Kistler 2011, p 254), and ‘the British drafted peregrine falcons to catch and kill’ Nazi pigeons (Kister 2011, p 248) A more macabre recognition of pigeons’ effectiveness came in another episode, when the Germans invaded Belgium in World War I Kistler writes that ‘Commander Denuit, the head of the Belgian Pigeon Service, could not allow the enemy to capture his 2,500 homing pigeons With tears running down his face, he set fire to the base, burning the birds alive’ (2011, p 244) It was exactly their success that led to their gruesome demise In a situation parallel to the fate of U.S war dogs in Vietnam, who were first successful in their work and then abandoned as an entire population, pigeons have seen their status radically reversed Kistler points out, ‘Since the end of pigeons in military service, the bird species is viewed only as a bane to human societies, not a help’ (2011, p 258) They have thus become targets to extermination in a range of places, from the U.S to South Africa and beyond Abuse in this case typifies too much of the thinking connected to war, in which whole populations of humans and animals become expendable, killable, a logic that Lindseth describes as ‘exterminism’ He suggests ‘ecology’ as an alternative model, in which shared lives and interdependence receive emphasis, a view congruent with the argument of this chapter (2013)