Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 417 - The Time the US Army Tried to Train Racist Attack Dogs Ft. Gregk Foley

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

USE CODE DONK50 TO GET 50% OFF YOUR PATREON SUBSCRIPTION https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys LISTEN TO BLOOD WORK: https://open.spotify.com/show/5jt9RZSCVMJ1KS84QHB9jJ Buy The Highlands Burn: https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX Get the audiobook (read by Joe) https://www.llbdpodcast.com/products/the-highlands-burn-audiobook During WWII the US Army developed a top secret program to create racist attack dogs on a swamp island off of the coast of Mississippi. This is the story about how Japanese-American soldiers were forced to act as bait for packs of untrained, starving, and abused dogs all because a Swiss psycho, who had no experience training dogs, convinced the US Army that each race smelled differently. SOURCES: https://www.npca.org/articles/3798-the-dog-trainers-of-cat-island https://historynet.com/dog-training-pacific-war/ https://www.sunherald.com/news/state/mississippi/article277536763.html https://www.uswardogs.org/WWII https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/dogs-defense-how-skip-spot-and-rover-went-fight-world-war-ii https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/national-dog-day https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/uncle-sam-needs-to-borrow-your-dog.htm

To the crack of rifles and the acrid stench of sorcery, a sun invasion sweeps through the highlands of the Confederation, and Syatt's peaceful village life breaks with the dawn. A sole survivor amidst the smoking ruins of all that he held dear. Siyat must make a choice, is pursuing revenge against the mercenaries that took everything from him, worth becoming one himself. As his escape pushes him into the gruff embrace of the foundlings brigade, he must learn to tread a path between his need to understand why his people were targeted for destruction and the new responsibility of his soldier's life, even as each new encounter with the horrors of battle force him to confront the terrible cost of his oath. Before long, the shifting fog of war casts old certainties into a haze of doubt,

while the stuff of legend seems clear as day, and Siat finds himself drawn into a much larger conflict that he could possibly imagine. My debut fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn, is now out on e-book, audiobook, and paperback. Much like our podcast, this book is a totally independent production and I hope you'll give it a try. As always, you can find the links where you can get it in the show notes below. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets

and merchandise when they're available, and also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, the world's only military history podcast. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and our special guest.

Gregory Foley, host of us. Love blood work. Yeah, yeah. How's it going on? You're right. I'm happy to continue my... I'm calling in a London residency, because I've been watching the show Hacks too much.

It's lovely. Yeah. This is my London residency. You've been doing all the Elvis classics at the O2. Exactly. And I can marry you, I assume. I don't know what the legality of that is in the UK. Much like Deborah Vance, the early episodes of this podcast

have been destroyed for racy content. Mostly just because of bad production. i.e. we did not have one. We did not have a producer. To be fair, so once again, we are here in London in my studio and much like the early recordings of this show, I can't guarantee that something won't fall off the ceiling on your head. In my defense, and possibly yours. That didn't actually happen until like two years in. Okay. When the AC duct in my roof exploded over Nick's head. And credit to Nick, we just kept going. He sat there getting a, A mysterious ceiling water dumped on his head? Didn't even blink. Yeah. We are, you know, sweating, riffing in what could be called Podforce One. Although it will be Pod Force One when Nate arrives.

Now it is, you know, the podcast International, because you flew from the Netherlands. I came the whole way from Wilson Green. And Greg came all the way from Margate. Yeah, the Isle of Thanet, which did at some point in history, apparently, used to be separated from the English mainland. I think we should bring it back. Like, we should. Margate separatists. One of the theories behind why Thannett is called that is that it may have been known during

like ancient Greek times of Thanatos as in like the Isle of the Dead and it was like some kind of burial ground. Okay. I mean, I'll tell you a couple thousand years later, it feels very much the same. Yeah, it's an Is an Isle of death. Yeah, it's the place where dreams go to die is like, do you want to open a small shop selling bespoke beanies? You've moved to Margate.

Don't worry guys, I'm hanging in there. It was either beanies or podcast and fortunately Tom grabbed me and said, I'm doing the beanies. I'm going to do something in Margate, which has been happening in my neighborhood, and that is open a specialty socks store. Oh, yeah. We've had like three of those pop up in my neighborhood. And, I mean, obviously, the easy answer here is money laundering. But there's also a weird amount of foot traffic in there.

Hey. You cannot need all of these socks. You can't. I mean, you know, people have feet. They need socks. Look, elect me on the platform of, I will get rid of your feet. I think it's mostly that when you go to any of the other parts of the UK that aren't sort of metropolitan centres where all the money flows, just where, you know, the rest

of the political economy is just abandoned. You get a lot of people who've moved down there because, oh, the house prices are quite nice down there. Maybe I'll buy a house. And they get down there, they go, oh, shit, I've got fuck all to spend my money on. Yeah. And eventually someone comes over, I've got a great idea. You got two feet.

Got some socks. Yeah. Always need socks. You always need socks. How would you like, you know, custom socks with that printed on them or like Shinji in the chair? I would buy those. I'd wear those. Admittedly, that would get me. But, fellas, I've gathered you here today to ask you a very important question. Have you heard about the time that the US Army tried to make dogs racist? I feel like we did a live show about this in Glasgow, but I don't think it was an intentional effort.

Yeah, I think we stumbled upon that one amongst ourselves. Yeah, if anyone had like a little intake from breath from me, then my main reaction was there was only one time. That I'm aware of. Okay. That was explicitly race-based. I should point out. Keep chasing that rainbow, boys. You'll get there someday. I believe we will,

that will come full circle, unfortunately. But first, we must let slip the dogs of context. Oh, shh, fuck off. This never gets any better when you're like,

oh, first, the dogs of context. I was originally going with who let the context out. That would have been better. I would have laughed. Well, the hounds of context are cooling.

Yeah, there you go. So dogs in war and the military are about as old, as the concept of domesticated dogs and people stabbing one another. As long as kings, pharaohs, or sovereigns first discovered they could conscript anyone and anything they wanted to go and die in the worst ways possible.

Most of the time, though, dogs weren't used for attack purposes. Because let's be honest here, a dog is not a great weapon, right? And any soldier with really any weapon could probably fight one off. Dogs are mostly used as guards, messengers, but it didn't take long to figure out, we can teach these fuckers to attack people. Yeah, it's because, you know, they discovered the profane science that has once again been discovered in the UK of how to make 4x bimpo. Keep that in your mind as we go forward.

I mean, to be fair, the Habsburgs were probably the first people to do 4x bimpo. Yeah, they just did it as a guy. It ended up being Charles of Spain. Yeah. For our episode here, we need to jump ahead to the United States, who found its first real use of war dogs, or what they're known today as the mostly cop nickname, canines. Mm-hmm. During the Civil War. On both sides, kind of.

The Union slowly over time developed war dogs for centuries, messengers, guarding POWs. But the South had a history of using dogs for, let's say, other purposes. namely tracking and attacking runaway slaves. Ah. They were used for other things as well during the war, but they were... Yeah, great.

We had Confederate dogs. It's great that we have a continuity of, you know, between dogs and the police and their origin. That is correct. Yeah. But they were so well known

for their violence. Because let's be honest here, even if they weren't being used for attack purposes, which wasn't always what they were meant to do, it was, they were always being,

used for slave patrols. So there's an inherent violence and, you know, horrible shit to that. And Union soldiers knew that. Union people knew that. And they were given standing orders to kill any bloodhounds or other dogs they found in the South

specifically on plantations during the war because of what their job was. Yeah, and now instead you just have guys in Essex breeding 4x Blimpo to hunt down Green Party voters. Yeah. I mean, while are members of the states killing dogs has become a national pastime

how the tables have turned. You know, British politicians, Jonathan Anderson, who works for Dior now also once kicked a dog to death. Jesus. I am thinking it's kind of, you know, in terms of what Joe said there about, you know,

the primary thing was being used on slave plantations to abuse enslaved people, where they did other jobs as well. I do like the image of someone being like, kind of bucked up that you're sort of raising and training all these dogs to, like abuse and more enslaved people and one southern to go,

not just, that. They do other things as well. We've invented this new game called basketball. Dogs are really good at it. I say there's no rule that says a dog cannot play basketball. I say we will put the dog

on the court and he will rival any man named Kobe Bryant or Kevin Duran. And I should say it's a bit rich that the union had a harder take towards the slave owner's dogs and the slave owners themselves. Because obviously the union did not line up

slave owners and shoot them all, because that, let's be honest here, would have solved a lot of America's current problems. But during World War I, the U.S., like many other countries, expanded their dog program. This still lacked any kind of central authority, and Americans used dogs the least of all of the allies. According to the American Red Cross, messenger dogs would often carry 25 to 30 pound packs of ammunition and rations through dangerous territory. They took soup to the trenches for soldiers? Oh good, the soup dog is... Is that video of the guy sat in the back of the car

with the pot full of gumbo? Mama, I ain't got no lid. The dogs arrived. There's just an empty part. They're like, we fucking... It's like Beethoven when they have like the little cask around their neck but just like tomato soup in it. Listen, Don Draper would have made that odd for combos if he had to gotten the contract.

For sure. Some dogs controlled the trench rat population, which is obviously a huge concern. And many of the animals helped with troops general mental well-being by just being a fellow homie. Yes, the mental health dog in the trenches. We have the unofficial trench therapy dog. And that's something that still exists today. Like, I've used a therapy dog when I was in the military. Was this before they had the little morphine, sort of like, what's they called, the little needlets or whatever? Oh, the serrets of morphine.

Yeah, the serrets. You've got a guy bleeding out on the floor. It's like, get Rover. Yeah, Rover just comes over and starts licking the wound. He's adorable. Their mouths are clean. It's okay. My wife. life kisses our dog on the mouth. What was his last words? The wife is there. What the widow? What was his last words? Like, who's a good boy? Who's a good boy? That would work for me. How would you describe his death? Rough. God, it's like the episode of the Simpsons were Homer's writing food reviews with Santa's little helper their dogs. Like, you've been saying rough this whole time. Say something else. He's like, choo-y? This mission report reads like it was written by a dog. He's like, dogs can't write, unfortunately. There is another group known as the Mercy

which are mostly used by the United Kingdom, where dogs would act as members of ambulance teams. Okay, so it's what I said. No, no, mercy dogs immediately United Kingdom combination is like, yes, the dog is going to be set upon you because you like overclaimed on universal credit. Yeah. The dog has been set upon you because you're wounded and we have budget cuts and we can't help you. This is just like chaos version of air bud. It's euthanasia bud.

There's nothing in the rule book that says a dog can't put a man down. This is actually where Jack Kavorkian was inspired. They would carry first aid supplies, and they'd also search no man's land searching for wounded, and then I assume would bark. I should point out here, though, like, again, the U.S. had no official military dogs during World War I, and there's no official program to recruit or train them. Like we've talked about before on some of our older animal-centric episodes. The U.S. had plenty of these anyway. This is mostly done independently on a unit-by-unit basis, where soldiers would just be like, hey, look, a dog. want to be friends. And I've done this when I was deployed. Like, you can't put a whole bunch of

teenagers in an area and have a stray dog population and then not tried to befriend it. I was worried that you were going to say that they were just bringing their dogs from home, being like, come on. Hold that thought, Greg. Oh, yes, someone else got hit with it for once, not me. Mama, I'm going to war. I'm taking a spot with me. Fuck sake. And sometimes, like, the British allies or the French would give them dogs to use that they had trained. for specific tasks, but most of the time it was just strays. The first organized, sanctioned war dog program for lack of that term, because it's not what it was called, was not set up until 1942.

Though once again, it got at start completely independently of the United States government. Instead, it was known as the Dogs for Defense program and was set up by the American Kennel Club. I am aware I'm the only American sitting in this room, but are you guys familiar with the AKC at all? I'm familiar with kennel clubs. Yeah, it's the same kind of odious background here. I'm only really aware of them because my mom was like a vet tech for 30 fucking years. So the AKC sets all of what is called breed standards for dogs in the United States. And what constitutes is not a breed of dog?

They're the same body that effectively has allowed people to destroy entire breeds of dogs by saying, oh, they need to look a certain way. so therefore dogs get inbred, and which is allowed by them, it spawns horrifically abusive poppy mills, and has become one the biggest lobbyists within the United States to influence laws to make all of those things still legal. Like, the AKC is an animal abuse organization, and that will continue here in our story. So Dogs for Defense's entire pitch was this.

Give us your family dog, and we'll train it to defend America. only America could come up with this fucking concept. I fucking love the United States, but I'm sorry. The mental country, but I love you. I admire you so much. It's absolutely insane. This program mostly boiled down to using the dogs for guards on like ports, supply depots, stuff like that. They wanted to recruit over 100,000 dogs to use them for those purposes.

And the program proved that, yeah, this could work. Like, they trained the dogs, though much as anybody was training a dog back then. They weren't expected to attack anyone. They were expected to do what dogs do, which was like bark at strangers, right? And using that as a foundation, they pitched an expanded version of this to the U.S. Army.

This was quickly approved by General Edmund Gregory with the idea of, yeah, they seem to be able to bark at people at the Supply Depot. Let's do that. Imagine being a dog on getting sent away to war and, you know, you appear missing or whatever, and you come back and experience,

the canine version of like a soldier that was MIA returning back from war and someone else has been fucking his wife there's just another dog eating out of your bowl I'm Jody could it get dear dog letter in the mail you open it up it just says rough

the thing is I want to preface this by saying I am I am listeners I'm a dog lover I really love dogs but I have to say like the moment you sort of talk about the combination of like dogs and warfare my mind immediately went to you could attach explosives to that thing. The Soviets did that.

I'm absolutely shocked that we've made it this far and they still like in America they still haven't put that two and two together. Yeah, I'm presuming.

I think it's because like Americans have a strange attachment to their animals which we'll get to but like the Soviets trained dogs to run under tanks with explosives. There you go.

And the problem with that was on top of all of like how comically evil that is is that the dogs were trained to run under tanks by Soviet soldiers. So they saw Soviet soldiers and what looked like Soviet tanks to be their friend,

so they would run under anybody's tank looking for treats? Same rules for war in showbiz, never work with children or animals. I love, Greg, that you have suggested the existence of Osama bin Lassie. Yeah, absolutely. By March of 1942, Dogs for Defense was just kind of absorbed by the Department of War, back when it was actually known that, and a Twitter handle just didn't change, and everybody insisted it was real. What was unofficially known as the Canine Corps was founded,

and it expanded in scope and would include training donated dogs from any one of 30 odd approved breeds that list of approved breeds, coming from the AKC to be guard dogs, centuries, and messengers. I love that, you know, even in the animal kingdom,

Americans have, like, created white supremacy for animals. Yeah, that's all the AKC is dog eugenics. And like, in a long enough timeline, they have destroyed so many dogs. So obviously, the army had never done any of this before. It's not like they had a cadre of dog drill sergeant, laying around that they could just point to and be like, yeah, simply train these dogs to do these

jobs. So they gave dog training duties over what was known as the remounting section of the quartermaster corps. Their job was to train to horses. Okay. That's like the same thing, right? Same thing. It's just smaller. Yeah. Next. They wanted to create a horse that Smadley-Botler could ride. This all seems for the sake of this episode, let's call it normal, right? Like government growing pains, they don't have any dog trainers. So what the army started to do was like look for people that had like a history in training hunting dogs. And we'll go into what that means a little bit later on, but they didn't have that in the beginning. And all this had probably remained in that slow growth kind of way. If it wasn't for one Swiss man who was living in New Mexico.

Of course, it's going to be some weird Swiss scientist, weird science pervert who like comes up with like, what if we make the dog nuke? Oh no, he wasn't a scientist. He was just some guy named William Prestry. Prestry heard the army's dog. program and said, yeah, you could do that. Well, you could have guard dogs? But have you considered you could train them to kill people? Now, listen, as a Swiss man, I am fastidiously neutral. My dogs, however, violently partisan. This was a new thing, at least in the U.S. while some dogs that ended up in military units in the U.S. famously during World War I had attacked people. That was never their intended purpose. There was never any kind of attack training in the U.S.

military, because remember up until now, there was no official dog program at all. The government was worried that if Americans knew that they were training people's loving household pets to tear people limb from limb, that maybe they wouldn't want to donate them for war service. Like, World War II was just such a real pinnacle of being a flim flam man. Yeah, I mean, it's an era where, you know, this and like we talked about the Civil War as well in their logistics and development programs before. It's just like, yeah, you seem trustworthy. Why not? Have you just thought about, you know, greasing your gun with? snake oil?

Yeah. Bucket. We'll buy a million of them. I was just one guy who's like, shit, I got to find all these snakes now. But that wasn't all. Prestry didn't want to train attack dogs to attack the enemy. He wanted to train them

to take a specific enemy. Okay, before we continue, there is two possibilities here. It's either going to be minorities or the dogs are going to be anti-Semitic. Nailed it the first time. Fuck off. That's better than my guess, which was that he wanted to train a dog specifically to kill Hitler.

It might have worked. That would have at least been a noble goal for that dog. Sitting a dog for weeks on him just staring at a portrait of the funeral. Von Stauffenberg opens up the briefcase and just like a Jack Russell in there with a bomb strapped to it. They got my letter then. Hitler was a vegetarian. He would have loved it. He would have loved dogs, to be fair.

If it was a big enough dog, you could have put the bomb underneath the dog's torso. And he would have been so busy petting it as soon as the dog was. rolls over to rub its soft belly. Boom, Hitler's dead. Well, Hitler also famously loved dogs. Like, and a dog kamikaze to kill Hitler, possibly could have worked. But to Prestry, you couldn't just train

dogs to attack Germans or Italians, you know, because they're white. They smell the same as us. No, no, no. You have to train dogs to attack Japanese people, because they obviously smell different than white people. Yeah, because the dogs couldn't really discern the smell of extra virgin olive oil

versus vegetable oil so they couldn't hunt down Italians. Exactly. The Italians are simply too slippery. The dogs would just eat the smoked meats. If you sent the dogs at the Italians during World War, they would just join the dogs, as history has shown. I should point out here, two things, three things, I guess. Prestry was not a dog trainer.

He had never trained any dogs before ever. He had no history of any kind of animal behavior studies. Of course. Sick. He had no scientific knowledge of what dogs could or could not smell. Good. And three, this is all completely fucking insane. But this is, this alludes a point about, you know, the American dream.

The American dream is not, you know, the pursuit of happiness or, you know, being wealthy or whatever. It's that like, you can do something if you're a convincing enough liar. Yeah, it's all salesmanship. Yeah, if you can lie well enough, like you can become, I don't know, Uber mentioned fewer of the Americas. William Pressury is just like the dog's deal guy. Yeah, I mean, and to be honest, this kind of like project dog. does make sense for one that began with this kind of Aristotelian ontology of like, well, let's get first things first. Like, a dog is a very small horse. No, no, we are anti-horse on this show,

but we're pro dog. If you made a dog-sized horse, it might be able to get behind that. Those kind of do exist if you have, like, a pretty big dog. Yeah, but like, what if you want, like, a mini labradoodle-sized horse? We don't go, we haven't, we haven't developed the technology yet. Science has not progressed that far yet. We're going to get DARPA on that. Listeners, if you have a dog-sized horse. Send it to the LLBD office. You can just put them

in a crate and ship them to LLBD's dogs for defense. When Brian Johnson is like finished with his research into how to get better boners,

he's going to move on to like, we're going to make a really small horse. That's going to be a jacked horse. The horse in like a

CPAP machine in a sleep tent getting all of its vitals monitored. Exactly. The US Army took one look at this idea,

clanced around and said, yeah, let's do that. Yeah, sure, why not? But rather than keeping the program under the quartermasters and their, I assume,

very confused horse trainers, the racist attack dog program would be put under the guidance of the U.S. Army ground forces. It was also labeled top secret, so people would have no idea they were donating their household pets to the attack program. What's that barking going on in there? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about that. Keep walking. No, admittedly, we should point out here that this is America in 1942.

I'm going to go on a limb here and say, most people probably would have been fine if they found out that their dogs are being trained to kill specifically Japanese people. I feel like a lot of Americans would still support it, depending on if you changed the minority. Yep. I'm not going to disagree with you on that one. Also, because you said 1942 and top secret project, I've now convinced myself that this was happening in the exact same location as the Manhattan Project. That was Oppenheimer's, like, very first idea. There's one guy, like, his briefing papers got mixed, he got half of one and half of the other.

He's got his wife. He's like, don't tell anyone about this, but I'm making a nuclear dog. We're going to split the dog? How does that work? We have to split the dog Adams. We're going to drop two very large dogs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's rooted in the same prejudice, so he's still there being like, well, no, we're going to drop the dogs on the Japanese. Yeah. It's different.

It's different. Pressery was commissioned officially into the U.S. Army as a captain, despite the fact he was never in the military and had no training. And owing to the secret nature of the program, the army leased a privately owned and ironically named island called Cat U.S. Island to be used as a training base. The last place they'll think to look. Ruled by an evil guy called Dr. Feline. Dr. Mouse.

Yeah, exactly. I love that Greg is experiencing in real time the psychic warfare that is recording this podcast in person. I promise you, I get to tell you here, it's going to get a lot worse. Some Swiss idiot who's like, I have nothing, I have no knowledge or expertise on what you've, I've volunteered to do. And they're going, great. you're captain now.

Yeah. These hundreds of men who presumably have so much more expertise and insights than you, yeah, they're your subordinates

now. They do whatever you say. This like Swiss mountain man who probably spoke English like Werner Herzog is like, what we need to do is weaponize the dogs.

You see the Japanese weakness is the canine animal. They cannot resist them. And he's a Swiss guy living in New Mexico. So he probably shows up dripped head to toe in turquoise with dreads.

And he's so sunburned all the time. showing the dog's pictures of Emperor Hirohito and be like, must listen to me. You must never listen to this man. When he tells you down, boy. You must destroy this man. You must destroy this man. It's like a classroom and all the dogs are sitting at desks.

And he just has like a big stick pointing out of blackboard. Cat Island is off the coast of Mississippi. It's also really hot, horribly humid and a swamp. In Mississippi? It's off the coast of Mississippi. Wow. No way. Yeah. And they thought that this was an environment close enough to be the Pacific Islands.

This was a decision made by someone who had never been to any of these places. Just some absolute hayseed hick being like good enough, close enough. This is like the most esoteric form of orientalism of all times. It's like when... I've never been, but I imagine it's like the Mississippi Delta. Do do do do do do do. The incorporation of Florida and like how they sold off like parcels of land in like newspapers or whatever to like people in the Midwest. And then they arrive and it's like, oh, everything's just a swamp and underwater.

or like another flimflam man has sold Cat Island the American government. They had been using it previously because it was a completely uninhabited island. But the army had only been using it as a bombing range

and a place to train like island landing operations. And that brings us to an important question. How exactly is Prestry going to train these dogs? That's a really good question. Poorly, I'm very interested to find out. Well, Tom, you did nail that part.

He knew he would need Japanese people to train the dogs to attack. But goodness. sake. And he asked the army to give him POWs. The army to their credit, I guess as much credit as I can give anyone during this episode, immediately refuse his request for Japanese POWs. Not because that is just the most obvious war crime anybody has ever come up with, but because they were worried that word would eventually get back to the Japanese government that they were using Japanese POWs as dog bait, and they would murder American POWs in reprisals. Yeah, I mean, yeah, they were just

like, look, we just send them to camps where. where everyone is not concentrated in one place, but like they're all fenced in. We're about to get to that. Oh, good. Enter the 100th Infantry Battalion. So a very short history here. During World War II,

there were two segregated Japanese American combat units. One of these was the famous 442nd regimental combat team, the most decorated unit in American military history, and the other was the 100th, which would eventually fall under the other. To understand this, we need to talk a little bit about Japanese Americans within the context of World War II. And again, this is not an exhaustive history. That will come later at some point in a series.

I promise. This is just so you can understand the context of how we end up here. Be excited for our eventual series on the history of Benny Hanna. Yeah, that's right. Fuck you. I assume everyone is at least a little aware that the United States shucked a ton of Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II. A whole bunch. Around 120,000 men, women and children were illegally imprisoned, most of whom were American citizens.

The categorization of who got interned and who didn't could be quite fluid, but most of the time, both Isay, that being people born in Japan and living in the United States, and Nisei, those American-born children of the Japanese immigrants, all from the West Coast, were selected and deemed untrustworthy as possible enemy agent. And for the sake of military conscription, all Japanese men were categorized as four see the military title for what they consider to be enemy aliens and therefore unfit for military service. So to be clear, at this point, Japanese Americans are deemed less trustworthy than dogs trained by a Swiss imbecile. That is correct. The one place with the highest population of Japanese Americans and the place where this did not happen was Hawaii. People of Japanese

dissent were the highest percentage of the entire population and remained so to this day. Therefore, the government decided if they rounded up the majority of the island's population, its economy, manufacturing base, the entire workforce would simply collapse. That good old American red line. On the mainland, non-Japanese people, you know, the Japanese folks, white neighbors, actively worked towards and supported the mass interment so they can internment then steal their property and businesses. I feel like we discussed this dynamic on the episode that you did on Bloodwork with me, Joe.

Yeah. Yeah. Weird how that happens. But this kind of racist backfilling program wouldn't work in Hawaii. There was no one to replace the Japanese people, so despite it having the highest number of Japanese people in the United States, there was no mass internment, just to go in to show how stupid this whole fucking program is. When the order came to discharge all Japanese Americans from military service, it would have once again effectively destroyed the Hawaiian Territorial Guard, because Hawaii is not a state yet, so it doesn't have a National Guard as a Territorial

Guard. So instead of disbanding them, they were transformed into a construction unit, which puts a lot of raised hairs on the back of my Armenian neck. Yeah, interesting. Though, that's wasn't good enough. And the men in these units who had been begging to be sent to fight the Nazis were deemed untrustworthy once more. And the Department of War insists they need to be moved away from Hawaii in case the Japanese invaded and they all turned traitor. So overnight and without warning and without being able to say goodbye to their families or where they were going, they were loaded onto boats and sent to California. Eventually, these units were sent to different training bases across the country to prepare for the war in Europe. And while this was going on, a group of 27 Nisei soldiers

training at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin were pulled aside and told that they got orders. Their top secret, you're not being told where you're going, and you have no option to refuse them. They were loaded into a plane and arrived in Mississippi, but they were stuffed onto a boat and moved only at night. As the government was worried that people might start

asking questions is why a boat full of Japanese people were heading out towards a place called Ship Island. Ship Island is where their barracks were built for them right next to Cat Island. I mean, like we all like to sort of romanticize what we would be doing or would have been doing back at that time when this kind of things were unfolding.

And it's very difficult to say, you know, people are guided by the sort of ethics, morality of their current, you know, present moment. But I do like to think that if I had been in Mississippi at that time and I had seen these ships of Japanese sort of internees being treasurer, I would be like, guys, what's going on here? This mutter bit must have seemed like the apocalypse for the Mississippi Delta's most racist man. It's like there are boatloads of Japanese people coming towards me. Well, there's not a ton. There's only 27.

Okay. And they were kept like completely in the dark. Like they, the government's goal was nobody's going to notice that they're here. And they were mostly successful with that. I mean, they are on an island off the coast of Mississippi as well. So it's easy to keep them away from the general population. And this is a top secret program. So you can't have a whole bunch of hayseeds staring around wondering what you're doing out there on those islands.

From there, they would be loaded into a boat again before the sun came up and ferried over to Cat Island, where they would be used as one Japanese veteran, Raymond, Hosaka put it as quote, dog bait. Now we're going to get to the bit that I was really looking forward to hearing as like, how did the Swiss scam artist moron train these dogs to recognize Japanese people? Oh, we're going to get there. Because remember, his whole idea boils down to they just smell different than us because they're a different race. So the goal was is to train them to pick up on that scent because they are Japanese

and therefore attack them. The soldiers weren't told anything about what they were doing until they arrived. When they got there, they're greeted by a line of kennels and 30 soldiers who were training the dogs. The confused soldiers are then given a helmet, some padded clothing, a starting pistol, and a slab of horse meat in order to run into the swamp and try to hide. The horses smell like Japanese people as well. You can see right on the beginning how dumb this is, right? Like, you're not training them to attack or track anyone. You're training them to be attracted to horse meat.

I'm sat in the back corner with a little notepad just with my hand. be like, yeah, few questions, just a few holes I've noticed here. Before we go forward, it's a great idea. By all means, go ahead. I'm just saying maybe we should deal with this first, but... Yeah, they're... You're the expert, after all, Mr. Swift's more. I should point out here that William Prestry is not even there.

Oh, for fuck sake. So the soldiers ran into the swamp and learned their best way to not get torn apart was to climb trees and hope for the best. Now, the real reason for this wasn't because they were afraid of the dogs, but rather they were afraid of the island's resident alligator population. Okay. Once the dogs track them down, the soldiers were ordered to climb down from their hiding spot, throw them the horse meat, by their starting pistol in the air, and then fall over and play

dead in order to make the dog happy. I love that the Americans essentially tried to do Ramory Island. Kind of. But I also just say as well, like... But now with dogs. At this point in the story, it doesn't sound like they're training the dogs. It sounds like they're training 26 Japanese soldiers. Kind of.

On how to avoid dogs. Yeah, on how to avoid dogs and play dead for the dog. And you can already see it at like the... various flaws, right? The soldiers, both trainee handlers and the soldiers being forced to act as bait, quickly came to conclusion that Prestry might be kind of stupid.

For starters, Prestry insisted that dogs worked as a pack. And most importantly, they would just know how to do this without any human intervention. So, like, the handlers weren't really doing anything. They were just kind of opening the crates that they were in and letting

50 dogs or whatever run out into the swamp to just go play, pretty much. This is like the bullshit stuff that like even the guy who created like oh the like alpha theory like wolfbacks has said it's like yeah it doesn't work like this like he studied them in a zoo yeah. But it's also like snake oil salesman or like new age therapist and every single generation of America gets its own like woo woo thing and you know one day oh you don't need vaccines because like if you just eat the right foods like your body will just know and this guy is doing that with dogs being like the dogs just know. The dogs just know how to work as a pack. Why the

if they just know. We should be paying the dogs. We should be paying the dogs. Paying the dogs and horse meat. You need to promote all the dogs the captain. I don't know if you guys know this actually, but in the current way the US military works, the dog and handler.

The dog outranks the handler. Yeah, sick. What? Yeah, it's like a way to kind of force the handler to respect and care for the dog. I think affirmative action has gone too far. Yeah. Can they not do that with the cops as well then?

Or is that just like, I feel like the cops have a bigger problem just leaving their dogs and their SUVs with the cars off and the dogs dying. For a country that institutionally hates diversity, equity and inclusion, like this is DEI for dogs in the 1940s. Well, I mean, America loves DEI when it benefits white people. So are all dogs considered white? But D stands for dog. Dogs, equine, and I don't know, insects. Insects, yeah. I'm really enjoying the image of like some police force somewhere in the United States

and the guy's looking at a dog being like, he's just about to get promoted to sergeant. And then one of the other cops being like, come on boy, we're going out to the car, winding up all the windows. I'll be damned if that fuck, fuck, we're dog going to outrank me. And like I said, Prestry is not there. He almost never goes to the island. And instead just kind of sends letters there with random shit jotted down to them for the confused trainees that just try to figure out what he wants them to do. with the dogs. So the people with complaints

are being told to put any of their notes in the sort of message box for Prestry to be sent back to him and then in return they're receiving these cryptic messages like something out of Twin Peaks.

Yeah. Excellent. Buffer dogs. Buffer dogs. Twin dogs. Hosaka and the other bait trainees also quickly learned

that the dogs did not want to attack them at all. Because why would they? These are all dogs donated by people at home. Right.

We found the hero of the story. It's the dogs. Okay. So the thing is is like dog's response. on like really well to action-based positive

reinforcement. So it's like the dog is being rewarded with food by finding them but not attacking them. It's like you were training the dog to find horse meat and to hunt down people with horse meat who are hiding in trees not attacking them. What the fuck do you think they're going to do when you like

drop them on some Pacific island? Yeah, I think I just figured out what act three of this story is going to be. And not to mention, they're training them to become friends with the guys who are bait because they're the ones giving them treats. They needed, like, they needed to figure out how to mount a gun to a dog that is remotely triggered. I mean, they've kind of just invented drones by, from first principles, but like, this is, this is so fucking stupid. And another important thing to remember here is these are not trained

dogs. These are people's dogs from their houses. They don't know how to track people. And I assume there's not like a consistency in terms of like breed. These are just dogs. One of the 30 approved breeds. Okay. Yeah, but it's like they're not. That's a big poe. Yeah, it's a large tent for dogs. This is this dog caucus is a light's big tent. The DNC of military dog. The dog national Congress. But like dogs, when it comes to training dogs, there is like specifics that are

applied to specific breeds. Behaviorally, they will generally respond the same, but there is specifics when it comes to like certain breeds. If you just have like a mishmash, you have no way to create a consistent methodology to train these dogs. This guy is like... But what if I told you, there is no. methodology to train them at all. Yeah, like, I've been on my...

There is consistency though, Tom. They're attacking the Japanese. The consistency mostly is horse meat at this point. Many dogs won race. I have been on this show on Mike for three years and I think this is the fucking dumbest shit I've ever heard. It's a pleasure to be here with you for it. I promise you, it gets dumber. Um, because like, there's another important part here that everybody leaves out the soldier part of the equation. Like, these dogs don't know how to track anything. They've never been trained how to track anything. Presti assumed that they just naturally know how to do this as some kind of strange swamp dog pack.

But like, Hosaka and the other men were forced to hide in the swamps. And they came to the conclusion that any soldier would when put in the situation. If we help the dogs find us, we don't have to sit in the swamp any longer than we absolutely have to. This is like trying to figure out, you know, military tactics from reading the Hardy Boys.

So rather than this being training, it turned into like the dogs going out to the swamp, Osaka and the other dudes been like, oh, there they are. And they would wave the fucking horse meat down. And then the dogs would come over and they'd get a treat from those dogs.

So they just became friends. They were playing hide and seek. I'm like raising my meat like it's Iwo Jima. There's just three of us with a big pole with loads of horse meat flapping in the wind. Fly the flag. I keep quoting Hosaka

because he's like the only one of these guys to be interviewed at length about his experience on Cat Island and he said the dogs and them just became friends finding them in hiding and just licking them on the face until they got their treat the way Hosaka words this entire portion

of the training seems like yeah he hated it I mean he has to go slop his way through a fucking swamp in the middle of the Mississippi heat but as far as dumb army bullshit goes it certainly could have been worse Yeah I mean I'm sure it was a traumatic experience for many of the individuals

involved, but I do like to think that the reason there's only Hasek's testimonies that the most of them are just like, this is too embarrassing for anyone to talk about it. Well, that comes with a pretty big asterisk, I should say, so far. Okay. It only took a few weeks for the Army to realize that maybe they listened to the wrong guy. And they

said a guy named Master Sergeant John Pierce to Cat Island. Now, Pierce had a history of training hunting dogs in the American context, right? In the U.S., generally, hunting is not done by dogs. Like, they're trackers. They pick, like, for example, like bird dogs don't kill the birds.

You're supposed to carry them. Hunting dogs help you track things. Very rarely in the US, outside of very specific kinds of hunting, are the dogs used to mulch it to death, right? Because you're hunting for meat or skin or furs or whatever. The dogs damage those things. They're not good for that tool. And see, Greg, I think you'll agree with me.

What they really should have done was they should have used the allied powers to procure a guy who looks and looks and sounds exactly like Jacob Breeze Morg. Yes. Because that is the man who knows how to train a dog to find a racial minority. You're telling me these dogs will kill? Oh, they'll kill, right?

Yeah, it's like they have like centuries of familial experience training dogs to hunt down Irish people. As pack animals. Yes. Yeah. They went to the wrong resource here. And that's not the kind of dog that Pierce trained. He trained dogs to track secondary to a human shooting it with a gun, right?

But unfortunately for him, and as we'll find out, everyone involved in this story, dogs included. Prestry is still in command here. He's captain after all. Yeah, and they only send a guy with like 20 years of military experience and dog training. He's like, I guess I have to listen to the fucking Swiss guy. So they get this Pierce guy in there and Prestry comes in. He's like, so now first principles.

A human is a type of bear. Pierce's hair just like steam coming out of his ears. There's like a train horn sound. A Japanese man is like a black bear. His hat just flies off his head through a pillar of steam and spins in the air. Pressery finally does show up to the island and he watches one of the training sessions and he realizes that firing a pistol in the air and giving the dogs meat didn't actually teach him how to attack anything.

Instead, he realized he may have accidentally conditioned the dogs to think that Japanese people were just treat bearing friends rather than enemies. Yes. Because remember, he's still thinking this excessive. explicitly as race-based attack dogs. He's not thinking of like, the relationship between domesticated dogs and people. You have just created Jay Edgar Hoover's worst nightmare.

So he gets rid of the pistol. He keeps the meat. And rather than having the men hand the meat to the dogs, he straps it to their bodies, including around their necks. He then starves the dogs to the point they would be damn near savage by the time they were released

to go out and try to find them. But this still doesn't create attack. dogs. The conscripted family dogs had come to know these soldiers, and these dogs aren't attacking people. No matter how hungry they were, they were not going to fuck these dudes up. That being said,

you cannot unleash a pack of starving dogs on someone wearing a Lady Gaga meat suit, and not occasionally get bitten. Almost every single one of the bait soldiers got bitten at least a few times during this attempt at training. Hosaka himself said he'd get stitches on more than one occasion, and he was not alone

in that. But he knew the dogs were not attacking them. At no point does he say, I was attacked by a dog. They never tried to hurt him. At best, these were accidental, incidental bites that he got while these poor starving animals were trying to get to the horse meat that was strapped across his body. Prestry also saw this. He realized that, like, that's not when an attack is supposed to look like. So he decided he would have to really earn his title of King's super villain of Racist Dog Island. He ordered the soldiers to be chained to the dogs and then ordered the soldiers to beat them. No, I don't like this.

No, the jokes are over now. This is sad. Prestry was confused at first because the Japanese Americans, who he saw as, remember, inhuman savages themselves, refused to hurt the dogs, their friends. Yeah, I'm also confused at this point. It was only after threatening

them with charges of insubordination in prison. Tres. Charging the dogs? You're being sent to the dog brig. The people. It was only after he threatened them with prison time that the soldiers acquiesced to beating the dogs. But even after doing that and letting the dogs off the chains to attack them, the dogs still didn't do it. The dogs were as confused as the people were.

Why were their horse meat homies hitting them now? And remember, these are domesticated dogs. These are family animals. If you hit your dog at home, it's not going to attack you. it's probably going to be very confused and scared. This is making me so sad. The dogs just don't see these people as enemies because they're not.

If anything, at this point, I wish I could say the dogs all turn and mauled the Swiss guy to death, but that's that what happened. You're doing everything you can to get these dogs to hate Japanese people and the dogs just refuse everything. Like, they literally are the most noble creatures in this entire story.

Instead, at the end, it's just you've just trained a bunch of dogs who really hate the Swiss Confederacy for some reason? And rightly so. Yeah. That being said, and this is weird, but the soldiers who are now being forced to abuse dogs that they liked generally had good things to say about their time on ship island when they were away from the nightmare factory next door. To understand this, you have to understand a little bit of the mind of the soldier.

Being a soldier sucks, to make a long story short, long days of sitting around doing nothing, doing manual labor, training, and in general, just looking forward to when you didn't have to work anymore. And that's when you separate this from what these guys have to. have to do every day, right? Long days of being bitten by dogs and being called racial slurs by a Swiss madman. More than that, though, soldiers will do incredibly stupid shit, including more work than actually needs to be done to get out of work, right? It should come as no surprise here when I say the soldiers like this job because they only had to work four hours a day.

They had every weekend off and spent their time drinking beer on the beach and going fishing. They got tickets to football games in Mississippi, which led to multiple race its incidents because this is America, they're Japanese, and they're in the South in the 1940s. For example, one time while out fishing for shrimp for Christmas dinner, someone alerted the Coast Guard that there were Japanese spies in the area. I mean, like, these guys literally got free beer all the time as well. Like, I can't think of another way to make soldiers happy,

and I do have an example of this. When I went through basic training, we had to sit through a presentation given to us by something called the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Now, the Everding Proving Grounds is where they test stuff, either on you, with you, vehicles, uniforms, secret third things you will probably have nightmares about, you know, that kind of thing.

Just because we're past the days of Cat Island doesn't mean we still don't test things on soldiers. And the way they pitched it to us, and I'll always remember this, is every weekend was a three-day weekend, you get paid extra, and every barracks room came with an Xbox 360. Now take this piece of horse meat.

The line of dudes ready to sign up for that shit was long as hell. Oh yeah, I bet. Obviously, this is a different situation, namely they let us volunteer for it, but soldiers will do dumb shit or find bright spots and dumb shit they didn't volunteer for

if that means they have to work less. I mean, fuck, I do a lot of shit for an Xbox 360 and a copy of, like, Halo 3. Exactly. And remember, this is a pitch being given to mostly teenagers. In January of 1943, the U.S. Army sent a delegation to the island

to review how the training was going. And let's just say they were, uh, unimpressed. Some problems. For starters, the dogs still couldn't find anybody because remember,

they still haven't been trained. During one test, these officers that were sent, we're like, well, we want to see if, like, the basic principles of your idea is sound.

Is a human a type of bear? Is a human a type of bear? So they sent a white guy out into the swamp and a Japanese guy out to the swamp. Like, let's see if your dogs can tell the difference. You might be surprised here

and you tell you. They fucking couldn't. And in another case, The dogs did go to the Japanese American soldiers, so Prestry was like, see, they can tell a difference. But like, the guys watching could tell this was just because they spent a lot of time together and gave them treats. This is like, you know, a part of like the book, Forrest Gump that got cut out of the film. It's like, Forrest Gump got sent to Cat Island to train racist dogs. And it didn't really play with like Tom Hanks on screen.

Tom Hanks draws the line of beating a dog with a chain. I mean, it's not exactly surprising, but it is incredible how many chapters of American history do boil down to trying to prove race science. Yeah, thankfully we don't do that anymore. Though pressurey, refusing to accept failure, beat the shit out of the dogs until they attack the soldiers. But the army wasn't buying this, and they were also disgusted by the obvious animal abuse in front of their eyes. Racism is fine, but they draw the line of animal abuse. Why is this guy such a prick? I thought the Swiss was supposed to be nude. You can never send a Swiss man in New Mexico.

It drives him mad. The colonel sent to watch a guy with the wonderful name Ridgely Gauthier. Yes. Go off. He knew he wasn't seeing anything usable or actionable and he called the whole thing a vaudeville animal act. The smartest man in the whole operation so far. Once, you know, the smartest guy in the room is the guy who has like the fucked up name in the way that like Americans used to be called Leonidas. Yeah, yeah.

Guy with the stupidest name possible walking into the room and going, you are not serious people. Prestry and the military at large still believed in the ideas of this program the different races smell different by nature of their race and you still hear people say this shit today we all have, we see it online, whatever for people who don't know

that's not how anything works. A person's natural smell has much more to do with their diet than anything else and wouldn't you have guessed it but a group of soldiers eating like a group of soldiers does doesn't smell any different

than any other group of soldiers which from my personal experience mostly just smells like white monster cigarette and stale farts. This is the bit that I was going to bring up in terms of I understood that the most that your scent sort of different was based on food. So I was thinking well that's fine but if they are soldiers being

fed the same as other soldiers then again I see another hole in this theory. Rather than admitting that hey maybe a weird race smell science is wrong the army decided that the actual problem was prestery which to be fair is like 90% of your problem right? At last.

So they fired him. He gets really mad. He threatens the government to out their entire program unless he's reinstated. Because remember, this is a top secret program. What you don't understand

is the Japanese is a type of bear and you are not grasping this science. I have consulted ancient alpine tones. You can't do this to me. I'm the captain. Meanwhile, there's some guy named Hank fuck. Who's an alpha?

He's getting carried out by six dogs that all outrank him. And they're sick of his shit. Stop making me bite my friends. Allegedly he also went off the deep end and wrote vague threats of violence to his old bosses to the point he got put in an FBI watch list.

And it gets even weir than this because after he gets put on that watch list, he just kind of vanishes. He leaves the U.S. allegedly and nobody knows what happened to him. I'd really like to think that the dogs had shooters in the street and took him out.

No, the Swiss dog wizard just like disappearing. Yeah, he just vanishes. I like got got by the dogs Yeah, I like to think the dogs got him He went back to Switzerland And became the first like hostile Swiss neutral In the sense that people People would be coming up to him being like

Have you seen what's going on in the words? I don't care, shut up I'm not interested I don't fucking care The dogs press him saying like You are not valid in these streets If we see you buy some any open bins You're fucked fuck

They're all dead to me Fuck off At the back of restaurants Don't come on our turf Yeah no the American race science They see this Swiss man getting increasingly angry And they're like Well you're clearly not Swiss

You must be Japanese get in the field. After this, the program continues for a little while, though Hosaka and the other said it got way, way better. They stopped having packs of angry dogs run out after them and with the hopes that they would bite their shit out of them, right? They changed the system to what we know today as military dog handlers, which is one dog, one handler.

That dog is trained. The handler is trained how to handle the dog. They also put Master Sergeant Pierce fully in charge of the program. And Pierce, despite being tasked with creating an army of race, racist attack dogs, strictly forbids abusing the animals. He's the one that kind of institutes the standard that we have today, which is like, you need to treat your dog better than you treat yourself because this is your job, is that dog. He also stopped trying to coax the dogs into actually biting anybody. Instead, he developed a revolutionary idea that, you know,

having an uncontrollable fur-based murder machine was not great. The dogs are trained in basic tracking, something they had not learned up until that point. And, you know, when they find someone out in the swamp, they're taught to corner them and only attack on command. Also, they utilize the secret white people science in approaching to dogs. Is that like, to get the dog to do

what you want, you have to kiss it on the mouth. That's right. Passionate. And when that command to attack is given, the man that they quartered is switched out with a dummy wearing their clothing and meat.

He's not creating a racist attack dog. He's just creating a normal attack dog. he's just creating a normal attack dog, which I suppose it was marginally better. That attack dog is still meant to be used against Japanese people. Yeah, but see, the thing is, is that, like,

the police have perfected this science in creating the racist attack dog by understanding that, like, in the same way, you know, like in mathematics, you know,

multiplying something by zero cancels out or whatever is that, you can't create the racist dog. You need to pair with the racist cop. And a racist institution. Yes. I mean, he was a forward, thinker in the sense that he was probably speaking to him saying,

now, look, you want me to train these dogs to attack Japanese because right now we're at war with the Japanese. But someday this war will end. And I see a civil rights movement coming over the horizon. We're going to have a different use for these dogs. Their mission was successful. Not because the dogs were learning how to smell Japanese people, but because they just had created a dog training program for the first time.

Once they cut out all the press trees insane bullshit, they just figured out how to train dogs. He's the press tree storming. I'd be like, I'm taking all my fire. with me. They're like, that's absolutely fine, press street. Please, fuck off. He's just like, he stumbles when he's walking out, just paper flying

everywhere, and it's just man equals bear. I like the idea that he fucked off into seclusion, dedicated the rest of his life to proving his theories, but obviously died in anonymity, he hasn't achieved nothing. He was definitely the single most annoying

local drunk at a bar. I like, I just like to think that he died in the swamp. Like, I have, encountered a lot, especially in the area I live in, a lot of kind of insane people in the pub with like mad theories. And like, this is totally something I would have to listen to someone say while I'm smoking a cigarette and waiting for it to be finished to leave. And in the end, this program was successful. The operation on Cat Island was given back to the quartermasters.

It was no longer top secret because, you know, they weren't turning them to attack people really anymore. They began recruiting more people who trained hunting dogs rather than random psychotically racist Swiss people. And from here, the soldiers of the 100th were sent back to their units. Many of them would go off the war, probably insisting to people that they swear to God had the craziest story about fucking white people you've ever heard in your life. The Cat Island Trading Center continued to grow, leaving behind its unhinged foundation, training hundreds of dogs and handlers, and everybody did their best to forget about the time they tried to create racist attack dogs. They forgot about it to the point that the U.S. Army makes zero mention of it on their page on

history of the use of dogs in war during World War II, skipping right over that part of Cat Island's facility's history. According to Hosaka, though, it created a lifelong fondness for dogs. Like, he had never had a dog before this. And he went his entire life, always having a dog afterwards. Even though he sported several scars from bites that he suffered on Cat Island. After he left the island, he ended up taking part in the invasion of Italy. He was shot and got separated from his comrades and wounded he crawled into a cave and over the course of a night he thought

he might freeze the death. But then a stray dog wandered into the cave and cuddled up to him and kept him warm. The next morning the dog left and they never saw each other again. Hosaka eventually got married, his wife and her family having been interned while he was away fighting in the war. I thought you're going to say he got married to a dog. He got married to a dog.

I mean, I was going to say this is the point where you know you cut to the flash over text which has like, you know, Hosaka went on to do this. Yeah. What happened to each of the dogs is the animal house theme song plays in the back. Animal house. Doot. Doot.

His daughter said that until the day he died at the age of 98, he would always cry when he told people the stories about Cat Island. Not because of what happened to him or his friends, but because what they made him do to the dogs. The end. What a fucking awesome guy. Yeah. Dude rules. Yeah. Thank you for your service.

I empathize with us so much because, like, that would make me so depressed having to be mean to the dogs. Yeah, I wouldn't, I mean, I would make him put me in jail personally, but also I'm not a Japanese guy during World War II. You know, I get it. You know, their lives were already hard enough. And not to mention during a time of war, refusing orders can technically get you shot. Not that that happened very often in the U.S., but it did happen during World War I. And based on the story we've been told here, you know, especially for a Japanese soldier, I think there'd be a little bit less hesitation about doing that on the count on the fact that you're currently training dogs to mall and kill Japanese people. the basis of them being Japanese. Yeah, I'm really happy that the dogs got pressuring the end. They cornered them in a dark alley in Geneva one day and just stab the shit out of them. But that is...

Yeah, it's me going to a Swiss graveyard and spitting on a guy's gravestone. They're like, why he spit on that guy's grave? Who's here? And I'm like, don't worry, it's a personal... It's for the dogs. Do you listen to lines led by donkeys? Check this out. The whole, like, thesis of, like, creating the dog equivalent of that scene in King of the Hill

where cotton meets Khan for the first time. and immediately understands he's low Asian. He's like ocean, ain't you, Mr. Khan? I've been on Cat Island. I kill fitty man. I learned this from a guy named Bill. That is the story of the time

that the US Army tried to teach dogs how to be racist. And fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support us on Patreon at any level. You get access to our Discord or where there's a channel for this kind of thing.

Or you can just ask us on Patreon. or you can attach it to a dog who is preferably not racist and send it to the studio and we'll answer it on air. Today's question is, what is a podcast that you used to listen to that has since been discontinued that you miss the most? Oh, I have an immediate answer

and it loops back to the very first time I ever appeared on this show that at the end of the Trouble series someone asked about a podcast and I said, Let's Fight a Boss, which is the old podcast from John,

aka Super iPatch Wool. and like that got discontinued maybe a month later. Yeah, we accidentally death noted that podcast. Oh, other podcasts. Mine's easy. Mine's knowledge fight. RIP. I fucking love knowledge fight.

It recently ended after like damn near a decade and a thousand plus episodes. Lovely show. I think I've complained more than once in our group chat. Like, I don't know what the fuck to listen to when I'm out of my long ass runs now. Yeah, eventually we'll get to say this show after I train dogs to attack you and they on stage. Yeah, you're going to make the world's first Azari attack dogs. Train the dog to attack the person who doesn't smell like corned beef. Another one is definitely like A-Lab. Yes. It's not over officially from one of them. I mean,

they have a very sparse release schedule, but it does seem like it's pretty much done. I recommended them over on lines led by robots to get more into the background of one of the voice actors involved in Full Metal Alchemist. And then I went back to listen to it and it's like when those things that like episodes are starting to disappear. And it sucks. I fucking love that show. Hate to see it. Never be us. I'm doing this till I die. Yeah, I mean, you got ahead of me on that one, Joe.

Honestly, I was going to say the exact same thing, Knowledge Fight. I think, you know, there are a lot of shows that do good work, but I really did. I think I sort of became introduced to them probably around 2020 while the sort of depositions were coming out, the formulaic objections episodes. And I think I learned a lot from Dan and George. and that kind of method of,

it was so groundbreaking for them in terms of Alex Jones was a figure that had been sort of mocked and ridiculed by people for years and years and years and this was the first two people to come along and say, we're going to accept this guy

on his own terms and take him seriously and follow him and really sort of process like how he thinks what he believes and how it works. And yeah, it really was.

It was a, you know, not surprising. It made sense that it's coming to end at the point that it did, but it really was like quite a, quite a groundbreaking show.

And I think that we are going to feel it's, it's absence now, whatever it is that Alex Jones goes on to the do. The Alex Jones show. Yeah, because he lost the right to the term info war. Yeah, but, you know, I think in terms of a guy using sort of very basic sort of formal logic and things like that and just sort of following the Info Wars guys and being like, they said this a month ago, now they're

seeing that, now they're saying this and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, the formulaic objections episodes, if anybody fancies some really entertaining and good, like, they're so good. They're fantastic. They're phenomenal. I'm really listening to them right now. I think I discovered them around the same time because I had a job at the time when they out where I was doing like a grand total of like four hours of commuting back and forth to work. Yeah. And they were, you know, two to three hours long. I was fucking perfect.

I have one for my way there, one for my way home. The only show where I load a new episode and it says like 53 minutes. I'm like, fuck this, man. Yeah. Like, fuck this one. You get me through the gym. Yeah, exactly. Nobody does it like them.

This whole thing's a love letter to them. I hope they go out to do something wonderful. I believe in Dan wholeheartedly that he will. But fellas, that's a podcast. You host other podcasts. plug that podcast. Beneath skin, show about the history of everything told to the history of tattoos.

I also have a studio which we are currently in in Central London. So if you need a place to record or even to work from, if you're a visiting podcaster or you want to get started, you can message me on Instagram at Scam Golden. That's S-C-A-M-G-O-D-I-N.

Or you can send me an email. You can find my email online or I don't know. Smoke a cigarette outside of pub. but I'll probably telepathically connect with you. And then I also produce a show called Bloodwork. Greg, take it away. Hello, listen to Blood Work,

a podcast about the economy of violence. Once again, my name is Gregory Foley, and I'm the host. Listen to blood work. You did it in the exact cadence that you use in every episode. It's so weird to see in person. You're lock in.

And this is the first time I have to say, this is not the only podcast that I host anymore. I also host the Untitled Warhammer podcast over on Iheart Radio with Robert Evans. Our first episode came out. You're asking when the second one's coming out? We don't know, but we are working on it. I imagine with our social milieu, it's going to be very difficult to get guests for that particular subject. Yeah. Riley just kicking down the door. Let me in. But I also obviously host this show. This show is ad-free, completely independent. You make

everything we do possible. So support the show on Patreon so we can keep being that way. We do no marketing or anything to speak of. So tell your friends, leave a comment. Pet a dog. Maybe the dog will tell us friends. We know they got dudes in the street. They're taking out to Swiss. That's why Nate isn't here. Give the dog's got Nate.

Give a dog a horse meat unprompted. Yeah. Just give a dog a treat. Sending a dog across to your friend with a little note in their collar and they open up and it just says, listen to lines led by don't know. I'm going to start doing that

whenever I go back to visit Yoravan with all the street dogs. It's going to be an English, Armenian and Russian. No, you're just getting like a stencil and like spray painting a QR code on the side of a dog. Leave us a review and wherever it is you listen to a podcast.

It helps us immensely, especially when it comes to getting venues because they look at that kind of thing. Buy my book. The Highlands Burn. It's out now on paperback,

ebook and audiobook. Wherever it is, you consume your books. Until next time, give a dog a treat and don't do anything to them we just talked about. Proust dogs,

not the Swiss. That's right. The Swiss.