The animals selected are part of the millennia-old story of domestication that has shaped nearly every facet of the human experience.
GRAHAM HILLARD: ‘Honoring the [other] animals that worked and (were SACRIFICED) alongside soldiers and sailors… The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) has awarded the medal 70 times since 1943. Pigeons account for 32 of the recipients. Dogs account for 33, including Mali, a Belgian Malinois who, on the hunt for explosives, sprinted twice through enemy fire during a 2012 deployment to Afghanistan. Salty and Roselle, Labrador retrievers who led their sight-impaired owners down more than 70 floors of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks, were awarded the medal in 2002.
Four horses have been awarded the medal, and so has one cat: Simon, a feral feline smuggled aboard HMS Amethyst in 1949 by a 17-year-old English seaman, only to spend the near-disastrous Yangtze Incident—in which the British sloop became trapped on that river for three months late in the Chinese Civil War—rooting out the ship’s rat infestation, thus protecting the ship’s food supply. The animals selected are part of the millennia-old story of domestication that has shaped nearly every facet of the human experience; in honoring them, we acknowledge that world-shaping partnership’. SOURCE…
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