It’s a brave soul – or a foolish one –that picks a fight with an emu, one of the world's biggest birds. As tall and heavy as an adult human, and quite capable of outrunning one, this Australian flightless bird makes a formidable adversary.
Though it is rarely aggressive towards humans, it is well able to defend itself if provoked by kicking out with muscular legs tipped with three clawed toes capable of slashing or even disembowelling an assailant.
What was the emu war?
But in 1932, it wasn’t just a fight that humans picked with emus; it was a war. And – arguably – the emus won.
After raising their broods in the Australian interior, many emus routinely migrate to the west coast in search of food and water. But after World War I, this started causing problems. Australian veterans had been given land in Western Australia, where they were encouraged to produce wheat.
The land wasn’t great for agriculture and post-war economic recession was driving down wheat prices. So when 20,000 emus turned up in the towns of Chandler and Walgoolan and started destroying crops and damaging the fences designed to keep rabbits off agricultural land, drastic measures were called for.
Farmers’ appeals to the authorities for assistance resulted in the government sending in the Royal Australian Artillery armed with two Lewis light machine guns. The plan was a simple one – simplistic, as it turned out, because it had failed to take the birds’ behaviour into account.
When the guns were finally trained on the flocks after a long delay due to heavy rains, the emus responded by breaking up into small groups at the first sign of trouble and scattering in all directions, which made it impossible to mow them down en masse as intended. Two days into the operation, the soldiers changed tack and tried to ambush a thousand-strong flock, holding fire until the birds were too close to miss. This time, though, one of the guns jammed and only a handful were killed. Efforts to shoot them from the backs of moving trucks also failed.
The army major leading the operation was impressed by the emus’ ability to survive bullet wounds: “They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks,” he said.
Who won the EMU war?
The emus won the war. After six days, with emu fatalities in the low hundreds, the shooting was temporarily halted, then abandoned a few weeks later. Subsequent requests for military help were refused. Instead, the government introduced a bounty scheme, though this, too, had little impact on emu populations.
These days, efforts focus on fencing. The 1,200km-long State Barrier Fence, originally built to exclude introduced rabbits from farmland, has now been repurposed to prevent the natural movements of emus, many of which succumb to starvation and injury at the barrier. Writing in The Conversation, Deakin University ecologist Don Driscoll states: “The fence has now been turned against native fauna.”