Look at your cat, spending its days curled up in the sun while you rush around cleaning up its feces and trying to convince it to let you pet it. What has that furry sack of organs ever done for you? Look at it again. Keep looking. Look deep into its lazy, vaguely hostile eyes, and say, in your mind, so it can hear you: "If this were the 1500's, I'd have strapped a jet pack and sent you into an enemy castle a long time ago."
You see, 16th century Germans weren't about to stand for this shit, letting their house cats lord over them like they were some limp-wristed Frenchmen. To that end, the University of Pennsylvania recently digitized some sweet illustrations from a 1530s manual on "artillery and siege warfare," which depicts just how easy it is to weaponize cats (and doves!) and send them into otherwise inaccessible enemy territory.
Penn researcher Mitch Fraas provided the following translation that accompanied the otherwise fairly self-explanatory illustrations: "Create a small sack like a fire-arrow. If you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited."
Fraas found no evidence that the plan, conceived by artillery master Franz Helm of Cologn, was ever implemented. It's not too late, though.*
*Gothamist loves animals and does not endorse weaponizing them for military purposes, even against that sonofabitch Herb who keep throwing bags of rotting vegetables into your garbage can.
