The Dark Side of Creativity: Uses of Animals in Warfare

Descriptions of monkey terrorists trained by the Taliban to shoot U.S. Military Members by identifying their uniforms are all over the internet this week.¹ Fortunately the claims of monkey mercenaries appear to be only web-based monkeyshines! But if these claims were true, could we count this monkey business as an example of the dark side of the creativity?
Primate expert Christopher Coe, director of the Harlow Primate Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, claims that it would be next to impossible to train monkeys to reliably wield sophisticated weapons due to the monkey tendency toward impulsivity.² (I imagine it might be a bit dangerous for the Taliban trainers who place machine guns or grenades in the hands of their banana-loving trainees!) Others suggest that it would be difficult to train animals - even those as mentally advanced as primates - to use complicated electronic equipment (although Coe mentioned that monkeys can be trained to play video games like "Space Invaders").
The whole monkeys-with-machine-guns story sounds far-fetched until you remember a scenario from the Cold War days, in which a project that represented perhaps the most bizarre use of animals in human warfare was devised. The project - dubbed Project ORCON (ORganic CONtrol) - was created by B.F. Skinner, the Harvard psychologist who was known as the father of operant conditioning and the author of Walden Two. Skinner was awarded a large grant by the U.S. Navy to create a pigeon-guided missile. Yes, that's right - a sophisticated missile guided toward its target by a committee of trained pigeons! (Apparently, pigeons aren't as impulsive as monkeys.) The missile worked like this: pigeons were trained through operant conditioning to peck at the image of a target that was projected on a screen in the cockpit of the missile. The screen was connected to the missile's guidance system, which made corrections when the pigeon pecks were off-centered on the screen. Three pigeons were considered more reliable than one, so the missiles were devised to hold three birds pecking at three screens. Now you may be wondering how a committee of birds could actually come to consensus when guiding a missile. Here is the answer in Skinner's own words:
"When a missile is falling toward two ships at sea, for example, there is no guarantee that all three pigeons will steer toward the same ship. But at least two must agree, and the third can then be punished for his minority opinion. Under proper contingencies of reinforcement a punished bird will shift immediately to the majority view. When all three are working on one ship, any defection is immediately punished and corrected." ³
Fortunately for the Free World, an electronic guidance system was developed before Project ORCON could get off the ground, and the project was discontinued in 1953. Pigeons were then allowed to return to more peaceful pastimes, such as riding bicycles on tightropes on the Ed Sullivan Show.
One measure of creativity is the ability to find alternate uses for the common objects of everyday life. If we consider animals as such objects, then the concepts of using pigeons as guidance systems or monkeys as hypothetical Taliban sharpshooters can be seen as creative uses of common objects. The creative use of animals in human warfare is certainly not new. Homing pigeons were used as by the Greeks to carry messages between encampments. Hannibal trained war elephants in the Second Punic Wars. And most of the wars of history have been fought from the backs of horses. Clearly, the animals we have so employed have become the unintended victims of our intra-species warfare. But what happens when we make them actual agents of war in our conflicts?
Some of my colleagues say that our use of animals as implements of war exists on an ethical continuum. There is a difference between training a pigeon to peck at an inanimate object on a screen and training a monkey to shoot a live flesh-and-blood target (even if the latter is hypothetical). It's an interesting distinction. In one case, we're using the animal as an unsuspecting accomplice to war. In the other, we're training the animal to be a willing aggressor. Is there an ethical difference? If so, where does the creative use of animals as implements of war cross over to the dark side?

References
1) CNN video report on the Taliban monkey story at http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/offbeat/2010/07/13/moos.jihad.m…
2) Coe is quoted in Jeff Schogol's blog for Stars and Stripes on July 13, 2010: http://www.stripes.com/blogs/the-rumor-doctor/the-rumor-doctor-1.104348…
3) Skinner, B.F. (1960). Pigeons in a Pelican. American Psychologist, 15(1), 28-37. Quote found on page 31.