The greatest rivalry in all of history.
Ever had a plan backfire so spectacularly it makes people laugh?
Travel back in time with me to an age when great flightless birds and men struggled for dominance of the world’s most dangerous island.
No, really.
Let me tell you of the Great Emu War.
Soldiers Come Home
After World War I, Australia gave a bunch of returning veterans farmland to settle, cultivate, and make a living on. This was a great plan, as the land was fertile and the young men needed jobs. But these Aussie vets weren’t the only ones who were eyeing this luscious real estate in the Land Down Under. Some 20,000 emu thought this newly cultivated land had plenty of tasty plants and insects.
They sent no declaration of war.
No intent to invade.
Their surprise attack caught all the farmers by, uh, surprise.
The last thing a farmer sees before all his fruit and insects are gone.
Emu are large and good at getting over obstacles, so a simple fence wouldn’t stop them. So the army veterans suggested a different control method: war.
I think they can be forgiven for what seems like a crazy idea today. World War I changed warfare forever with the invention of highly efficient, mobile machine guns and tanks. Tanks were overkill, but these vets thought that maybe a machine gun could take down the absolutely enormous flocks of emu pillaging their farms.
The Aussies (try to) Strike Back
Setting up for the big bird battle.
The government agreed, and sent out a small detachment of 3 soldiers to wreak vengeance upon the flightless birds. It was a commander and two machine-gunners against the feathered horde. It went…poorly. The Australian army took no casualties but their pride.
It wasn’t really their fault. Though the emu didn’t fight back, they were fast and kept their distance. The Australians imagined opening fire into enormous herds and leaving only a few stragglers at the edges. The reality was that the birds scattered as soon as the men came into view. The army would set up an ideal firing position and have no giant birds to fire at.
When they did manage to ambush an emu battalion, they’d take down one or two birds in the initial salvo and then the rest would scatter and flee. The army detachment was spending hundreds of bullets for only a few dead birds in each engagement. Clearly, trench warfare was a poor method of pest control.
The PR Battle
But now their pride was wounded. The army couldn’t admit defeat, and instead kept engaging their foe and–perhaps–bending the truth a bit in their after-action reports. The unit reported many thousands of avian casualties, but most historians believe it couldn’t have been more than a few hundred at most.
The detachment spent through its stash of ammo and then called it quits. But the birds returned unfazed. Ultimately, the farmers came up with better fencing methods that kept even the crafty emu out of their land.
But the war wasn’t over for the army. The press got wind of the debacle and dubbed it the “Great Emu War.” They seemed to delight in the idea that the emu won. The heroism of the army in the other recent Great War was hard to remember in light of the more recent catastrophe.
Are you trying to vanquish the mighty emu?
Have you fought your own Great Emu War? I’m not talking about the chipmunks eating your lawn furniture or voles rippling your yard with tunnels.
In your business, have you tried to fix a problem or start a new initiative that metaphorically welcomed hordes of flightless birds to ravage your land? And when it went south, you didn’t reevaluate or course correct, but doubled down?
Laugh it off, like the emu.
Then try something new. If you’d like some help figuring out what’s working and what’s not with your business, we should talk. We’d love to help you solve your “emu” problem.