In history, there have been many a great farce. One such event which stands out as being the most ridiculous - the Emu War of 1932. Yes, that is correct, “Emu War” and no this isn’t a made-up tale to entice you towards this site. This is in fact a true event which took place in our world’s history. This bizarre event took place shortly after the end of World War One in Australia.

Australia, the land of a common running joke about how everything and anything that exists within its land can kill you if the sun doesn’t get you first. Thought this is very amusing, the event that befell history in 1932 was very serious for the people involved.

The precursor of this event is the end of World War 1 - in its aftermath, nearly 5,000 veterans were gifted farming lands in Western Australia. This location happened to be on the edge of the Emu’s current habitat, which with a draught that hit the area in 1930. Causing the Emu’s to move out of their normal territory in search of food and water, this created a problem for the farmers.

However, despite the farmers' perseverance, a drought caused the crops to fail and basically whatever was left the emus would gobble up. For the poor ex-soldiers, fencing was out of the question, so they grabbed their guns and started shooting the birds. This helped for a time and killed nearly 3,000 emus.

But despite these killings, by 1932, a 20,000 estimated emus assaulted the farmers’ lands and their plentiful food supplies.

The farmers demanded something to be done! The normal complain process was an appeal to the Minister of Agriculture.

However, the ex-soldiers now farmers, did not trust the Minister of Agriculture. So instead they approached the Minister of Defense instead who pretty much declared an all-out war on the birds. Granting the farmers the use of two machine guns, and over 10,000 rounds of ammunition, with the addition of two expert gunners.

With these resources, it was sure to be an easy win. The end result, however, was win by attrition for the emus, who outlasted the human shooters. There were no human casualties, if there were, it was from embarrassment. But only 986 of the nearly 20,000 emus died, and 9,860 bullets had been fired. The soldiers and the Australian government were just fully embarrassed by the whole ordeal.