Warfare is certainly known as a time where man’s inhumanity to his fellow man (or woman) is often on full display. But we don’t necessarily dwell on this question in the history books: if we’ll commit atrocities on another human being in the name of King and Country (or equivalent), what would we be willing to do to an animal?

Well, it’s not a pretty subject to delve into. Nowadays if you google up “pigs and landmines” you’ll get articles about pigs being trained to carefully snuffle them out, rather than the darker accounts of herds being intentionally driven onto suspect fields, which I suppose provided not only mine clearance but a good source of pork for dinner so long as you didn’t mind a little shrapnel in your bacon.

Barbaric, sure, but on a scale of one to mass graves, poison gas and ethnic cleansing, these sorts of considerations can fall by the wayside. No doubt there are soldiers who dealt with the horrors by clinging onto some code of conduct where they’d shoot an insurgent but draw the line at killing a dog (at least a dog that wasn’t actively trying to bite them) but would you hesitate at tossing a grenade into a sniper’s nest because some birds might be nesting there, too?

It’s a time and place where estimations of Right and Wrong can get as muddied as a French field in WWI. Is it worse for a human that understands what’s happening or an animal that doesn’t? Do even the humans understand what’s happening half the time?

But all in all I’d say it’s the traditional pet animals like dogs or the otherwise stereotypically “cute” critters that have the best chance for some modicum of mercy. Rats? Rats don’t have either going for them and tend to be considered pests and disease carriers, besides. No one sticks up for rats, or certainly doesn’t on the front lines. Hell even in peacetime we just about make a hobby of injecting them with cancer-causing chemicals and otherwise being less than copacetic. That they survive at all in a war is probably testament to them being as cussedly determined and adaptable as us. And of course breeding like… well, rats.