Pro-war activists from the Russian region of Tatarstan have been sending their house cats to the front lines, in the hopes that they can combat the plague of mice and rats in the trenches.
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“Soldiers complain to me that mice are bothering them,” Vladimir Maligyn, the head of a local patriotic-military group, said to Russian state television channel TNV about the wartime role that the cats are meant to play. “Cats saved the Hermitage [a state art museum] during the war, so I thought to myself: Why not send cats to our boys as well?”
According to the TNV report, so far, four cats have been “mobilized” to the army from Tatarstan, but activists are preparing to send more. But not all cats are equal: “Our cats are used to catch mice and calm soldiers down,” Maligyn said, “Those local ones, from Donetsk, prefer to run among corpses in the fields.”
Rodent plague
The story about cats being sent as boots on the ground caught the attention of independent Russian media as well. Journalists for The Insider website wondered, not without irony, who the real animals are in Russia's trenches: the cats, mice, rats or soldiers. "We leave this matter to the readers' judgment," they concluded.
Rodents make life seriously difficult not only for Russian soldiers. International media regularly remind us about the plague of rats and mice in the trenches on both sides of the front line. The U.S.-based multinational news channel CNN recently reported that "The front lines are swarming with rats and mice that spread diseases that cause vomiting and bleeding from the eyes, and also weaken combat effectiveness."
"In a trench where I was with four other soldiers, there were about a thousand mice."
The Ukrainian authorities say the problem has also been brought to their attention. At the end of 2023, Ukrainian military intelligence reported on what they called "mouse fever" on the Kupyansk front. Soldiers and others near the front lines were said to have suffered from it due to microparticles of mouse feces that they unknowingly ingested with food.
"They were vomiting, their skin and eyes were itchy," according to media reports.
"Imagine you go to bed and the night starts with a mouse crawling into your pants or sweater, biting your fingertips or biting your arm. You sleep for two or three hours, depending on how lucky you are. In a trench where I was with four other soldiers, there were about a thousand mice. They weren't visiting us, we were their guests," a Ukrainian soldier nicknamed Kira told CNN.
Worldcrunch 🗞 Extra!
Know more • Rat infestations have historically been a risk of trench warfare, with World War I being perhaps the most notable example. The presence of food, shelter and rainwater during the war created the perfect environment for the rodents to live. Rats “feasted off of the bodies of the living and dead soldiers,” which, together with the surplus of water, lice and corpses created the perfect conditions for numerous diseases to develop, write scholars Bryce Humbert and Joseph Bailey. Some trenches hired rat-catchers to deal with the problem, as the soldiers feared going to sleep in their presence. This is where countless pictures of piles of dead rats laying on the ground or hanging on the trenches, like in the picture below, originated from. — Fabrizio La Rocca (read more about the Worldcrunch method here)
Evidence of stalemate
Like the Russians, Ukrainians are also using cats to help their efforts along the front lines.
German tabloid newspaper Bild reported that rodents have become a serious problem for Ukrainian soldiers because "they make it impossible to sleep, bite and eat everything in sight."
Both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers admit in conversations with the media that animals destroy helmets, damage communication cables, and eat food, medicine, clothing and leather products. They also chew through wires. "Sometimes, in just one unit, the damage caused by mice and rats can amount to tens of thousands of dollars," they said.
The plague of mice and rats in the trenches can be seen as evidence of the stalemate.
Ihor Zahorodniuk, a researcher at the National Museum of History of Ukraine, told CNN that the losses could be much greater. "If they bite the wires, it may lead to loss of communication, which may even cost their lives," he said.
Journalists point out that the plague of mice and rats in the trenches can be seen as evidence of the stalemate the conflict has reached. Their rapid proliferation is facilitated by the static nature of the front line, which results in the accumulation of rotting waste and corpses in the trenches. Soldiers had to face similar conditions during World War I.
Last year, Ukrainian photographer Konstantin Liberov described, on Instagram, his stay in a trench near Bakhmut: "The accumulating garbage has nowhere to throw it away. Corpses abandoned in a strip of no man's land give off a heavy smell of decay. They can lie there for months. It's hard to breathe. The stench is terrible. The whole field, it's covered with bodies and decomposing body parts. There are flies and rats everywhere. It's dark because of them."