The Screwworm War

The screwworm is one of those creatures that seems to exist simply to bring misery to those around it.  Though seemingly just a normal everyday house fly as an adult, the baby stage of this bastard is particularly horrifying.  While most baby flies tend to spend their formative years growing up in piles of shit and rotting carcasses, the screwworm larvae for some reason developed the odd evolutionary quirk of only being able to survive by eating living flesh.  To accomplish this, the adults lay their eggs in open wounds, the eggs hatch, and voila, the host starts to get eaten alive, which as you can probably guess is not all that great.

Though endemic to most of the Americas, prior to the 1930’s screwworms were commonly only found in the southwestern United States, the deserts of the region creating a natural barrier to spreading further.  However, by the 1930’s, growth in long distance interstate commerce in agriculture resulted in the screwworm getting spread into the southeastern United States with a couple of shipments of imported cattle.  Rather enjoying the new wetter climate they found themselves in, the screwworms went gang busters, killing countless livestock and various wildlife critters.  The people living in the southeast, not all that happy with this development, demanded government action.  This being the era of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the government responded by sending out scores of random formerly unemployed people to quarantine infected animals, burn animal carcasses, and to try and make livestock ranges and pastures baby proof so that animals wouldn’t get injured.  It worked about as well as you can imagine.

By the 1950’s, screwworms were a serious problem that was growing worse.  A series of mild winters had resulted in them moving as far north as South Dakota, and the country no longer had a ready supply of unemployed people to throw at the problem.  It was at this point that a USDA scientist named Raymond Bushland entered the fray.  A bit of an outside the box thinker, Ray came up with the idea of zapping the screwworms with a small dose of radiation, because in the 1950’s a small dose of radiation was the go to for any scientist looking for new and novel ways of doing things.  Rather than trying to create a team of super screwworms, as the strategy might suggest, Ray’s goal was to find the right dosage to make the male screwworms sterile without killing them.  His plan was to raise sterile screwworms in his laboratory, then release them into the wild, thus denying countless fertile male screwworms from getting their nasty on, lowering the screwworm population over time.  Now today this might sound like some kind of mad scientist plot, but back then people just thought bigger when it came to such things.  Ray’s idea was first tested out in 1954 on the small Caribbean island of Curacao.  In less than a year the screwworm was eradicated.

With Ray’s idea proven to be effective, the USDA geared up for all out war in the United States.  The campaign began in Florida in 1957. The government built a massive fly breeding facility in Orlando, which pumped out millions of sterile screwworms, which were then dropped on a weekly basis across the state throughout the summer via airplanes.  By the next year, the program was expanded to cover the whole of the southeastern United States, with success declared by 1960.  With the southeast cleared, the intrepid scientists of the USDA decided to attack the screwworm on its own turf.  New sterile fly factories were built in Texas, and by 1966, the United States was declared screwworm free.  However, this victory was short lived, for the screwworm was still very much a thing in Mexico.  To keep the screwworm from coming north, the USDA tried to create a barrier of sterile flies some 300 miles wide along the border.  However, this proved less than possible given the border was some 2,000 miles long, and in 1972 a major outbreak made its way clear north to Oklahoma.  Not willing to admit defeat, the USDA began funding a sterile fly program in Mexico, steadily pushing its way south and largely eradicating the pest in the country by 1985.  However, the USDA was not done yet.  Buoyed by its victory, the USDA began eradication campaigns across Central America, clearing out countries one by one.  By 1995, screwworms had largely ceased to exist north of the Panama Canal.

Unfortunately for the USDA, this is where their campaign came to an end.  Mexico had been more than happy to get rid of screwworms, and so had been fully onboard with the whole thing.  As for Central American nations, their relationship with the U.S. was similar to that of children to a drunken stepfather.  They mostly went along with things in hopes that Uncle Sam didn’t slap them around.  The same could not be said of the nations of South America, who much preferred trying to prove they weren’t afraid of the U.S. by flipping it the bird from a safe distance.  As a result, USDA attempts to eradicate screwworms south of Panama met with little success.  Admitting defeat, the USDA shifted to a containment strategy, annually air dropping millions of sterile screwworms along the Panama Canal in order to keep the screwworm from making its way north.  This program continues to this day.

Mister Saddlebags

In 1797, an English physician by the name of Alexander Russell was traveling near the city of Aleppo, in what is now Syria, helping treat a plague in the area, when he made an astounding discovery, a small rodent that only lived in that specific region.  Okay, maybe discovery isn’t the right way to say it, given the locals had known the critter was there for generations, but he was the first European guy to not only notice its existence, but also bother writing down that it existed.  Finding out that animals existed was all the rage in Europe at the time.  The locals called the rodent by a name that roughly translated from Arabic to Mister Saddlebags.  Not being down with that name, Russell called it a hamster, which kind of sounds like the German word for hoarder, because you know, hamsters shove food in their cheeks all the time.  Anyways, after making his astounding “discovery”, Russell promptly forgot about the hamster, probably because he had more important things to worry about, like a fricking plague, leaving it to be “re-discovered” in 1839 by George Waterhouse, an English naturalist whose primary job was wandering around looking for cool animals to draw and write about.  However, the hamster was far from the coolest animal added to the so-called list of animals now known to exist by English people at the time, so though it was “officially” categorized, nobody really gave two shits about it.

That all changed in 1930, when a Jewish biologist living in Jerusalem named Israel Aharoni launched an expedition to find a living hamster specimen.  At the time, many Jewish people were returning to the lands of their ancestors and a major movement had begun for these settlers to convert Hebrew from a language only used during religious ceremonies to an everyday language for talking and walking.  Israel was contributing to this movement by making up Hebrew sounding names for the various animals and plants in the area not described in the Torah.  For some reason this involved travelling around and actually looking at the animals in person rather than via pictures in books.  Israel was kind of a weird guy.  He was also a coward, a terrible worrier, and hated in anyway being uncomfortable, which was surely just awesome for those travelling with him.  Israel travelled to Aleppo where he paid several local guides to wander around from farm to farm, asking if anybody had seen Mister Saddlebags.  Most likely the guides thought the whole thing rather stupid, but money is money after all.

Eventually such door to door canvassing paid off.  A farmer reported that he knew hamsters were living in one of his wheat fields, something he likely instantly regretted when Israel ordered his guides to start digging.  However, there was little he could do since Israel had the blessing of the local sheik, who evidently was bored and wanted to see how things played out.  Anyways, after digging down some eight feet, the guides found a mother hamster with a litter of eleven pups which Israel promptly had them put in a wooden box to take back to Jerusalem.  Israel had gotten it in his head that hamsters would make great laboratory animals, and he wanted to see if he could breed them in captivity.

Things did not go well from the start.  As it turns out, mother hamsters tend to be a little extreme when they get freaked out.  Evidently convinced being put in a box was the end of the world, she started killing her young, biting the head off of one poor bastard before Israel removed her, and for god only knows what reason euthanized her.  That left him with ten pups he needed to feed by hand with an eyedropper.  On the train, the pups chewed their way out of their box and escaped, and Israel was only able to find nine.  The pups pulled the same stunt again soon after arriving in Jerusalem, and this time only four were recovered, one male and three females.  Somewhat wiser, Israel managed to raise what remained of the litter to maturity, and then put his last male with one of its sisters, which the male promptly ate.  With fingers crossed, Israel tried again.  This time the incestuous hamsters did what was expected of them, and then they did it again, and again, and again.

Fun fact, hamsters have a gestation period of only sixteen days and have on average ten pups at a time.  The hamster Adam and Eve had 150 offspring in total, which mated with each other to create thousands of offspring, so on and so forth.  As hoped, the hamster turned out to be the perfect lab animal, and Israel began selling them to researchers around the world.  Early on, breeding pairs were smuggled into other countries in coat pockets, but as their usefulness became better understood, they began to be shipped through legitimate channels.  Many of these research hamsters found their way to the United States and England, where noticing how cute the little buggers were, researchers began taking them home to give to their children as pets.  Today, hamsters are the fourth most common pet in the U.S., behind fish, cats, and dogs.  Pretty much all pet hamsters worldwide are descended from Israel’s first successful breeding pair.  To this day, very little is known about hamster’s behavior in the wild.

Comrade Mao

In 1949, Mao Zedong and his communist forces gained full control of China, finally bringing to close a thirty-three year period of political chaos, foreign conquest, and civil war.  The story of how the communists eventually rose to take control of China is basically a Rockyesque comeback story with a cast of millions, which I highly suggest you look into, but we’re going to skip over all that in favor of what Mao did once he was in control.  Seen as a prudent leader, intellectual, and poet, many hoped that Mao would reform the long suffering country and bring about prosperity.  Unfortunately, Mao’s prime mentor on how to run a communist dictatorship was Joseph Stalin, a murderous psychopath who had people executed if his breakfast gave him indigestion.  Things did not go well.

Now it should probably be known that despite claims otherwise by that cool kid in college with the Che Guevara poster in his dorm room, most of the communist regimes in the world began with political purges.  Which is just a nice way of saying they killed or imprisoned anyone seen as against them; which in practice meant businessmen, intellectuals who didn’t kiss Mao’s ass, and anyone with contact with the outside world.  Wanting to prove that he was just the most communist of the communists, Mao’s purges involved the killing of some one million people and another million being sent to re-education/labor camps.  This fun little activity was quickly followed by two major reform movements.  The first was land reform, wherein land was taken from its owners and given to poor peasants, which for some reason often included beating the former land owners to death, killing some 2.5 million people and sending a further 4 million people to the labor camps.  The second was an industrial and government purge targeting anyone with what were called “capitalist leanings”.  Families, friends, and coworkers were strongly encouraged to rat on each other, and those taken into custody were tortured until they committed suicide, resulting in the deaths of another million people.

With some 5.5 million deaths under his belt, Mao got around to actually improving the country as he had promised.  Following the Soviet model, he began campaigns of industrial modernization, public education, and public health which did a lot to help begin transforming the country.  Unfortunately, none of this made Mao or his contemporaries any saner.  In 1956, wanting to be seen as a benevolent leader, Mao called for intellectuals across the country to feel free to voice their opinions on how the country was doing.  Not happy living under a dictatorship, thousands of intellectuals responded with criticism of the regime.  Not being all that happy with this response, Mao had some 500,000 people killed and another one million imprisoned.  Unfortunately, many of these people were the ones who had made the initial reforms in China so successful.  As a result, Mao took a more direct role in planning the next set of reforms, which he called The Great Leap Forward, a planned major expansion of agricultural and steel production which started in 1958.

Here’s a little fun fact about Mao Zedong.  He and the sycophants he surrounded himself with knew absolutely nothing about agriculture or steel production.  However, rather than ask anybody, they instead came up with all sorts of crazy theories which pretty much immediately resulted in a sharp drop in Chinese food production.  Scared of being sent to labor camps for failing to meet quotas, communist officials claimed record production, which gave Mao the great idea of seizing already scarce grain supplies to sell as exports.  Things only got worse when the same officials forced farmers to hand over their farming implements to melt down in order to meet the ridiculous steel quotas.  The end result was one of the worst famines in world history, killing some 42 million people over a five year period.  When Mao learned of all of this, he just kind of shrugged his shoulders and stated that fewer mouth to feed meant it would be easier for China to feed those who remained.  When people began to complain about, you know, starving to death, he had some 3 million people killed, many beaten to death or buried alive.

Even for the most hardcore of communist supporters, the disaster that was The Great Leap Forward was a little much.  Not wanting a crazy man like Mao running things, they conspired to reduce his role to mainly a ceremonial one.  At first Mao seemed to take this development in stride, spending most of his time writing about his political views, collected in what became known as the Little Red Book, which became widely distributed across the country.  This was part of a long-term propaganda campaign meant to basically deify the aged dictator, which was particularly effective amongst younger people who had spent most of their lives under communist rule.  Tiring of just being a figurehead, in 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, wherein gangs of mostly young people, known as the Red Guard, rose up and began attacking and persecuting anyone who was seen as being too intellectual or not socialist enough.  Mao regained full power over China, but things quickly got out of hand.  The Red Guards went from persecuting people they saw as enemies of the state to outright murdering their asses.  Massacres became common, with the Red Guard beheading, beating, burying alive, stoning, drowning, boiling, disembowling, and even eating those they viewed as dissidents.  When that got old, the various Red Guard groups began fighting and killing each other.  Eventually the military had to be sent in to restore peace, but by then some 9 million people were dead.

Mao Zedong continued to rule China for the remainder of his life. He died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 82 in 1976 from complications brought about by heavy chain smoking.  Despite being directly responsible for the death of some 60 million people, four times more than either Hitler or Stalin, he is still widely viewed in a positive light in China, where his atrocities are largely played down by government propagandists.