Australia once deployed its army against emus — and lost.

Following World War I, veteran farmers in Western Australia were struggling with tens of thousands of emus trampling crops and fences during their migration. In 1932, the government sent a military detachment armed with Lewis guns to cull the birds.

The emus turned out to be fast, evasive, and impossible to herd into effective range. After several weeks of limited success and mounting ridicule in the press, the operation was withdrawn. The emus kept coming back in later years, and no similar military cull was attempted again.