Stuff You Should Know - Amazing Animal Stories!

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Regular animal stories are wonderful enough, but when animals lead amazing lives the stories become almost unbearably wonderful. You’ve been warned! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Jerry and the Step You Should Know.

This is the Step You Should Know. That's right. Amazing animal like this one. That's right, that will partially delight you, and if you're an animal lover, should partially horrify you at times. If you don't like animals? Then you're probably gonna listen.

I don't know, you could be like, yeah, you probably wouldn't listen. Amazing animal stories, skip. But who would do that? One star. Yeah. So we're talking animals today, and like we said, not just animals, amazing animals, because animals are great to talk about.

We've talked about octopi, and duckbill platypie, and elephant eye. Did we do the platypus? I believe we have. Almost positive, if not, it's due. So animals are fun to talk about. It's even more fun to talk about animals that are accomplished.

That's right. Okay. You know, I was at the playground the other day, and my daughter was playing with another little girl, which is kind of one of the fun things about kids. They just immediately bond with another kid. And the girl turned out to be a bear cub. I wish.

No, this girl smashed a ladybug and said yay, and the parents went around, I was there, and I was horrified. And my daughter said, that wasn't nice, you shouldn't kill animals. Good for her. It was like, good for you. That's great.

And then this girl stomped an ant hill. Girls got issues. Yeah, and you know what, she found another ladybug, and I said, don't touch that ladybug. She said, why not? I said, because you killed the last one. Yeah. And I felt fine admonishing this child that was not mine.

Did you wait until she turned around and clapped by her ear to really startle her to drive it home? No, but she did trip later on, and under my breath I went karma. Oh really? Yeah. She was fine. Under your breath you went, ha ha.

That's right, above my breath. Yeah. By the way, with Mike the Headless Chicken, which we're gonna start out with, I couldn't remember how this existed in the annals of stuff you should know, because I knew it did, and I thought it might have been one of our dumb videos,

but it turns out it was one of our great videos. Which one? It was, you did a don't be dumb on this. But surely we've talked about Mike before. I thought we might have, but don't be dumb was the only thing that came up, and it was great. Weird, well thank you very much.

We've done some cool videos together though. Remember this day in history where we veered off into conjuring Satan for a little while, and we ended up in a different dimension, and I thought those were great. So silly. Anyway, okay, so like you said, we're talking about Mike the Headless Chicken first.

That's right, which September 1945, if you were in Colorado, and you happened to live near the Olsons, Lloyd and Clara. In Fruta, Colorado. Yeah, Fruta. Do you know where that is? It's by Grand Junction, which I think is-

Do you know where that is? I feel like I've been- West Colorado, like on the way to all those amazing national parks. Colorado's very varied. You think of Colorado as just being this amazing mountain estate, which it is in parts, but they're also like planes and all sorts of stuff.

That's where there's an ocean right in the middle of it. Right, that's where Canyon National Park, or Canyonland, Arches. Candyland? That's where the guy cut off his own arm in 127 hours. Mr. James Franco did. Sure, yeah. So the Olsons were farmers, and they were killing birds.

Lloyd would cut the heads off of these chickens, and his wife would clean them up, because after all, it was 1945. That's kind of how the division of labor went back then. And he would go in and sell these chickens at the market. And he went to gather up all the chickens, and he got to one with no head that was still alive. And he went, what in our nation?

That's right, that's a direct quote. You should be dead. I saw that for this one in particular, he aimed to preserve the neck as much as possible. So he just took off the head. Yeah, he did a good job, I guess. Because I think his mother-in-law was coming over for dinner, and she liked fried chicken necks.

So he was trying to give her a fried chicken neck, just taking the head off. The thing is, this one was still alive. And that's still alive in the way that a chicken will run around with its head cut off, like everybody knows. Yeah, he was just being the chicken. Yeah, so he did that.

He ran around like a chicken with his head cut off, but then he stopped, and he started pecking at the ground with his stump. He started preening himself. Yeah. Basically acting like he still had a head, and like he wasn't planning on dying anytime soon. That's right.

So Lloyd said, let me put you in this apple box overnight, and just, I assume we'll get up in the morning and you'll be dead then. God will take his vengeance on you over the night. I don't want to do anything more. Like you consider it a coffin, basically. And he woke up in the morning, and this chicken was still alive, a rooster, technically.

So he- He said, what's for breakfast? So he took this thing to that meat market just to show everyone, like you gotta see this. Sure. This is what anyone would have done, I think. And then the word starts to spread. Everyone was amazed at this headless chicken.

Word starts to spread around fruta. Why do I have a bad feeling we're pronouncing that wrong? Is there any other way you could pronounce that? Fru-wida? Yeah. That could be, I mean, in Georgia, they call Cairo Cairo. That's true.

And Viana for Vienna. That's right. Woof. So, did you just woof? Yeah. So he takes this rooster. Everyone is quite impressed, of course, at this headless chicken and word spread around

about what was going on there, and that eventually attracts the attention, of course, to a sideshow promoter who said, this chicken is dynamite. I don't think you know what you have on your hands here. Yeah, you Rube, you Hayseed. I mean, let's go into business together, is what he said.

Totally. So this guy's name was Hope Wade. I kept waiting for him to turn into like an underhanded, devious kind of guy, because he was a 1940s sideshow promoter. He seemed to have been fine. Pest all the great tests. Exploiting all the right humans and animals.

He was just in it for the love of the game from what I could tell. So he gets together, Hope Wade, the circus sideshow promoter, gets together with Lloyd and Clara, and they start touring the country with Mike the chicken. But first, I don't understand why they did this. Maybe just to make the whole thing even more bonafide,

I'm not sure. They went to Salt Lake City, and we should note that Hope Wade traveled from Salt Lake City to Fruida. I think that's what we're gonna go with, okay? Okay. Which was like 300 miles. In the 40s, the 1940s,

that's not an easy distance to travel back then. No. And because he heard about a headless chicken. Right. But think about like what he was putting on the line with that. Let's say it took him four days to get there. He could have been doing any number of things

those four days. The chicken could have died while he was on the way there. That's true. And yet it didn't, and he made it there, and he became a business partner with the Olsons. He had a hunch, and he went with his gut, and it paid off. So the first thing he did, sorry,

was to take them back to Salt Lake City and introduce them to some scientists there. That's right. So the scientists did a lot of tests. They, apparently, we don't know this for sure, tried to do this surgically to some other chickens, just to see if it worked, I guess. And Mike was like, stop, stop.

What are you doing? Life magazine showed up and ran a story in 1945 called Beheaded Chicken Lives Normally after freak decapitation by Axe. That wasn't a freak decapitation, it was very purposeful. Yeah, but I think they were saying it was freak and that he survived having his head chopped off. Maybe they should have said freaky decapitation.

Sure, but that's when Mike got huge. That's right, of course, life magazine is huge. Yeah, it was huge. I think Time eventually did one on him, and it's really hard to overstate how big of a deal Mike, the headless Wonder Chicken, I think is what they ultimately finally dubbed him, became in the United States.

He was, people would come from far and wide to go see him whenever he came to town. I mean, once it hit the internet, it was like wildfire. Well, that's what life magazine was basically back then. Yeah, that's true. So they all went to California and Arizona, then hope, they had to go back to the farm at some point, Lloyd and Clara did, so hope toward the Southeast,

which I bet it was just like gangbusters in the Southeast. Sure. I looked up when he came to Atlanta, because surely he came to Atlanta, and I couldn't find anything about it. Oh, that's because he went to Terminus. Right. It was pre-Atlanta.

Yeah. They started getting letters. They started getting fan mail. And hate mail. Yeah, some people compared them to Nazis, which I don't get that at all. I think. Experimentation, maybe?

Yeah, kind of Mengele-esque. Mengele-esque. I combined ish and ask together. That's a nice new trend. Completely messed it up is another way to put it. I think we should start using that from now on. Ash? Yeah, why not?

Okay. I like it. All right. They got a letter from Alaska saying, can you swap out Mike's drumstick and put in a wooden leg and just keep this party going? Only in Alaska. Very funny people there.

And they became so well known, especially around Fruida. I hope that's it. Because if so, we're the only outsiders that ever pronounce it correctly. You're welcome. Thank you. No, no, yeah.

So Fruida, they became so well known there that people would write letters to the owners of the headless chicken. And that was it. On the outside of the envelope and it would show up at the Olsen's door in their mailbox. Yeah, the good old days. So everything's going quite swimmingly for him.

They made a lot of money off of Mike. He actually lived for 18 months without a head. Yeah. And like there's pictures of him standing there, standing up without a head and his little heads down by his feet. Yeah, you can see this stuff. Yeah, it's on the internet.

Go check it out. It's on the current Life Magazine. The internet, the worldwide life. Yeah, I did some, of course, the calculation, the inflation calculation. They were pulling in, in modern day money, about $64,000 a month. Back then it was 4,500 and they said

Can you imagine? That Mike was valued in modern money at $142,000 or 10 grand back then. Yeah. So they upgraded their farm equipment? Yeah, they bought a new pickup truck. That thing is sweet. Did you look up a 46 Chevy pickup?

No, but I'm pretty sure I know what it looks like. Oh man, they're nice. Yeah. And yeah, they went from being poor Colorado farmers to pretty well off Colorado farmers. They've been using a mule and a wagon before to go to town. Now they're driving in their brand new Chevy pickup truck. So it was really good for them

that Mike managed to live after they cut his head off. But while he was alive, they managed to study him and figure out exactly what happened. Yeah, so it's, to be fair, it's a little more accurate to say Mike, the faceless chicken. Okay. Although when you look at a picture,

it looks like the head is completely gone. But what happened was he cut off the, this is all by accident of course. Remember he's trying to preserve as much of the neck as possible. Yeah, which he did because he left the back of the head on there and apparently these chickens,

most of the brain function and the brain itself is a little further back. Tucked back into the neck. Yeah, so the brain lived. That's why this chicken was able to walk around and be a chicken. And he definitely took a slice off of the brain. Oh, sure.

But I think this one guy in this one BBC article by Chris Stoker Walker, the chicken that lived for 18 months without a head. There's really no wrong headline you can have when you're writing about Mike, the headless chicken. He basically says probably about 80% of the brain was left over. You know, everything that controlled breathing.

Right. Heart beat, digestion, all that stuff. And so all they were left with was figuring out how to keep Mike alive. He still needed food, even though he didn't have a head or a face or any more. He still needed food. So the Olsons would actually feed him with an eyedropper,

a milk and water combination. They would give him little grounds of corn. Right into the esophagus. Right, yep, right into the esophagus. Oh yeah, yeah. When he got flemy or if a little bit of corn got backed up or stuck in there, they would use a syringe to pull it out.

And Mike lived this way for 18 months. He actually went from two and a half pounds to eight pounds without a head. Mike thrived. The big question was like, which I had the whole time, was why didn't this thing just bleed out? Right. Because it had his head cut off.

And the science thinks, you know, just a quick blood clot just kind of took care of it. Yeah, science went, God. Yeah, sure. That was good. So there's kind of a sad ending. Of course, Mike is eventually gonna die. You would hope that Mike just died of old age.

He did not. But when they were in Arizona, they woke up to the sound of chicken choking. And Clara said, Even Jerry. Is that you? And her husband was like, it's not me this time. It's Mike.

Right. And sadly, Mike had expired because they left the syringe behind that would clear that esophagus. Yeah, at the last sideshow they'd been at. This was a fatal mistake. It was, which is really sad for Mike. He choked a death on a piece of corn. Oh my God.

But they also watched their main source of incredible income. Wealth. Just choked a death on a piece of corn because they left the syringe back at the fairgrounds. What a crazy story. So in this BBC article, Troy Waters, who is the great grandson of Lloyd and Clara Olson,

he said that his great grandfather told him this whole story. And for years, basically for decades, would never fess up to Mike dying on him. He said he sold him off to a sideshow promoter. Yeah. And he finally fessed up before his death that Mike had choked on a piece of corn.

And that that was that. What an amazing story. An amazing animal story. All right. Well, we're going to take a break and come back with another right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Okay, we're back, everybody. Amazing animal story, number two. And this one is the one that is pretty horrifying in some ways, but also cute, but also horrifying. I honestly don't know what's horrifying. All right, well, I'll point it out when we get to it. Oh, I know, it's fine. This is the story of Vojtek the bear.

And I believe you got a lot of this stuff from Time Magazine and Atlas Obscura. And what else? Another Atlas Obscura. Oh, okay. Wow, they doubled up on this one? They did. For good reason, because it's a pretty amazing story.

And there's two different memorials you can visit. That's true. So Vojtek the bear. Vojtek is a Polish name, which is odd for a Syrian brown bear found motherless in Iran, Persia at the time. I don't think it was Iran then, yeah. 1940s? Yeah.

Yeah, World War II changed a lot of geography and boundaries and country names. Boy, you're telling me. Right. So a Polish name for a Syrian brown bear is a little odd until you know the background behind this whole thing. So before we get to the bear, we have to talk a little bit about why there were Polish soldiers in Persia in the 1940s.

Well, because of the war. OK, so now we talk about the brown bear. Yeah, specifically, the 22nd Transport Company Artillery Division in the Polish Second Corps, they were fighting in World War II and on April 8th, they found this little cub in the mountains of Iran. Well, there was a boy who had found it and they traded him for it.

What they trade? They traded some coins, some chocolate, a Swiss army knife, and a can of beef. Hey, not bad. Yeah, you know. I mean, it depends on how the beef is prepared. Right, you know. I bet it was some kind of a jerky.

OK. You know, that travels well. Sure. So by the way, I finally got over my beef jerky reticence because I don't know, years ago when I lived in Los Angeles, I ate moldy beef jerky one night when I was up late. What's wrong with you? Well, I didn't mean to.

I came home from the bar. Afterward, now I was just eating in the dark in front of the TV. I was like, this tastes funny. And I turned on the light and it was just covered in blue mold. And I vomited. And I literally hadn't had beef jerky in like 15 years. Oh, OK.

But I'm back on it. OK. It's good stuff. Yeah. And a good snack as it turns out. It is. I have some right here if you want it. No, I'm good.

I know you're a jerky enthusiast. So April 8th, they find this bear, trade it with the boy. And they were Polish prisoners of war who were being moved from Siberia, from a prison there, or a gulag, to Egypt. And they got this bear and basically were like, this is our little baby now. Yeah.

And just one more thing. So this army, this Polish division of soldiers, had been captured by the Soviets and held as prisoners of war. But after Germany turned on the Soviet Union, the Soviets sided with the Allies. And part of that siding was to release these Polish soldiers to form a military unit known as Anders Army.

Look at you. OK. All right. And then now they have a brown bear in their position, a little bear cub. That's right. And as you could imagine, these soldiers who had been away from their families and their own children

adopted this little baby bear as their own. And here's the part that's terrible, is he did certain tricks like if they offered him a cigarette, he would take a puff on it and then eat it. Right. That's awful. Yeah, eat a lit cigarette. Yeah, you should not do that to an animal.

No. Or let it drink beer from a bottle. Well, that's pretty hilarious, actually. So a bear drinking a beer from a bottle, and this is what one of the people who were there said, that Wojtek would drink the beer from the bottle. And when it was empty, he would hold the bottle up and look into the opening to see where the beer went.

Right. Because he wanted more. Hysterical. I think it's hilarious. Other things that would happen there is Wojtek would drink a lot of water because you were in Egypt, of course, it was very hot. He would chase after these oranges

that they use for grenade practice. He would break into the shower. So he could drink that water, which was a problem, because they were rationing water. Yeah, because they were in Egypt. It's a little scarce outside of the Nile. That's right. So he just basically became the mascot

for this artillery unit. Like just through and through, they love this bear so much. And he loved them right back. There was a, well, just a real mascot thing going on. Yeah, and even when it came to battle, there are rules that say you can't have a bear in war. Yeah, it's pretty much. Can't have any pets.

Unstated. And so they said, oh yeah, well, we're going to enlist this bear and give him an official number and rank, private Wojtek, I guess. And Wojtek, by the way, means joyful warrior. I don't think we said that. No. And so this was now an official soldier of sorts

that allowed them to skirt the rules of war. Yeah, he was a private in the second corps. I mean, that's, OK, well, then you can come along. Yeah, see, I thought this was pretty terrible, too, bringing a bear along to the front lines. Well, so most of the time when he was in the front lines, or anywhere with them, his main role, aside from mascotting, was they trained him to just kind of sit in the cab of a truck

to guard it, to protect it, keep anyone from stealing it. I bet that works. Works pretty well, I would guess. Yeah. Well, during this battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, he was there on the front lines guarding trucks and supposedly started carrying crates in artillery during this battle.

There's no photo documentation of it. There's plenty of pictures of Wojtek and the Polish second corps hanging out, doing their thing, wrestling, having fun. There's no pictures from this battle, but there are witnesses who say, yeah, this 600-pound, six-foot-tall brown bear was walking around carrying a crate of artillery shells.

Were they spent? Were they new? Were they unused? Who knows? But he was definitely doing that. That's the story about Wojtek. Yeah, I'd say get that bear away from the field of battle. Sure.

That's just my opinion. But I'm sure everyone loved it. Eventually, though, sadly, the war would end. And everyone was like, well, what are we going to do with this bear? It's like when you get a bear with a significant other and you break up, like who's going to take the bear? Sure.

You fight over the bear. Everyone wanted the bear, of course. Wojtek was beloved. And they said, well, here's what we don't want to do, is send him back to Poland because the Soviets love their bear insignias. And they'll just scoop him up as a symbol for communism. Yeah, and after the Yalta conference,

Poland went behind the Iron Curtain. That was that. And so these Polish fighters who had been fighting for Polish freedom got the exact opposite at the end of World War II. And they're like, you're not taking our bear. You're certainly not going to make him a symbol of communism, like you were saying.

Yeah, and they were fighting with the Allies and the Brits by this point. So I think Wojtek ended up in Scotland because of that. Yeah, with the 22nd Artillery Regiment, they ended up in Scotland around Edinburgh. And so he was with them when the war ended. And their status was kind of up in the air too. They all decided to live in exile.

And Wojtek lived with them. And he eventually went to the Edinburgh Zoo and became one of the most popular attractions at the zoo for years. Yeah, and was just sort of like in the army, was a part of the community. Apparently they would take him around to kids' parties. He would go to concerts and dances.

And just a beloved bear. He knew how to yell free bird at inappropriate times. An amazing bear. At the age of 22, sadly, Wojtek would die in 1963. I don't know about how old bears are, but that seems like a decent life for a bear. How old? 22?

Sure. But they think partially why this bear died was because of damage to his esophagus from that cute little cigarette trick that they would play. Isn't that awful? Yes, it is. So there's a woman named Orr. Her last name is Orr.

Eileen Orr? Eileen Orr. She wrote Wojtek the Bear Polish War Hero. There's a colon in there. You can figure out where it goes. And she said that she lives in this farm that Wojtek lived in in Scotland right before he was moved to the zoo.

And his claw marks are still on some of those trees, which that would be quite a sight to see. Amazing. Yep, I thought so too. Is that all you got on Wojtek? That sure is, Chuck. All right, we're gonna take our final break and come back with a tale of another animal

adopted by the military right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an S.O.S. because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

OK, so final amazing animal story. Yet another animal adopted by a military unit. This was not a bear in Poland, though. This was a very cute dog, a St. Bernard, Bumsa B-A-M-S-E that was adopted by the Royal Norwegian Navy during World War II. That's right. And he kind of got drafted along with his owner,

who's a guy named Lieutenant Erling Haftow. Great name. And Erling Haftow was a harper master in a town called Honingsvog on the Margrøya Island. You really going for it, huh? I don't think I got that last one, right? In Norway, right, on the north coast of Norway. And so Bumsa would just kind of like hang out

with Lieutenant Haftow. He was like the family dog. And very early on, he became beloved, at least with the Haftow family, when little Vigtis Haftow, the three-year-old daughter, fell ill. And apparently Bumsa would not leave her side for like this whole 12 days when she was at death's door until she recovered.

Yeah, so they thought this dog is good luck. I don't know if they thought it healed her daughter. Probably not. Or their daughter, but sure. But they thought it was certainly a good omen. And at the very least an exceedingly loyal dog. Yeah, and this was in 38. In 39, World War II breaks out.

And so Haftow was called to active duty. And this is something, if you've seen the movie Dunkirk, they would take civilian ships and basically make them into warships, and not necessarily like battleships, but bring them into active duty as well. So they gave him a whaling ship called the Thorod 2Ds and said, you are now a coastal patrol boat

and you are a patrol boat captain. Right, so he was part of the Norwegian army. And as a ship's dog, which Bamsa was, he was the ship's dog already, when he was entered into the log, he became part of the Norwegian Royal Navy himself. That's right. So he was Bamsa, sea dog of the Royal Norwegian Navy, right?

That's right, where did you find this stuff, by the way? Oh, this came from famous dogs in history. I loved it, that's probably one of your favorite websites. Yeah, and then Kit and Morgan Benson had something on find a grave, and then there's some other ones I've seen. So Bamsa and Lieutenant Haftow are just kind of hanging out, doing their thing, coastal patrolling on the Thorod.

And it's not just the two of them, but Lieutenant Haftow's in charge of the Thorod. And there's this whole crew, and they're starting to love Bamsa, like more and more and more. Of course. Eventually, the Nazis invade Norway, cue the booing.

And the Norwegian King says, everybody, let's get out of here, we're gonna go form a government in exile in the UK. Right, let's go to Scotland. Specifically Scotland, everybody regroup there. And so the Thorod and Captain Lieutenant Haftow were put in charge of minesweeping around Dundee Scotland. That was their thing now, keeping the UK safe.

Yeah, and just like, it's very similar to the Vojtek story in a lot of ways. They both ended up in Scotland. They were like an hour and a half car drive apart from one another at the same time. That's crazy. Isn't it? So just like with the Vojtek story,

Bamsa becomes beloved by the town. Goes on the pub crawls, would sit at the bar. Apparently there was one story where there was a cat sitting in the seat that was usually occupied by the dog. And of course, Bamsa comes in and is like, get out of here, cat, that's my seat. And not only did he go to the bar just to hang out, he went to the bar to drink beer with his fellow sailors.

Again, boo. Drank beer out of a bowl. It's not good for a dog, but kind of hilarious still. But he was also kind of the DD because he was well known for going to the bars and the pubs to get his sailors back to the ship before curfew so they wouldn't get in trouble. That's right.

He learned how to open doors. He wore a little hat. This is very cute. You can see picture of this, the little sailors cap. So once he learned to open doors, he could visit all the businesses all around the harbor. Oh yeah, people just like, come on in. After he learned to open doors, he learned to ride the bus.

Yeah, they gave him a bus pass that he wore around his neck. Yes. That is super cute. But not only that, Chuck, what makes it even cuter is Bamsa would go to the bus stop and sit there and wait. And the bus drivers would stop and let him on and he would climb up to the top deck and sit there and look out and be like, hey, I'm Bamsa.

So great. Good to meet you. So I think you said that he ended up being good luck still to the soldiers. There were more than one instance where Bamsa would either break up a fight or foil some sort of crime. There was one soldier who was getting mugged

and Bamsa came up and attacked the mugger. One guy went overboard. I think he was kind of drunk at the end of the night and fell in the water and Bamsa jumped in and barked and barked and then kept this guy afloat until they could rescue him. Yeah, like saved at least two men's life. Pretty great.

He also was extraordinarily brave when the Thorod would be out patrolling and take fire from German planes. He would sit next to the tail gunner, I guess on the tail of the boat, that's what they call it. And with a little helmet, a little steel helmet on his head. Yeah, there's pictures of that too. And just sit there and probably point with his paw

like there's one over there. I can't imagine the sound. I guess it just didn't bother him. Yeah, and he would not leave the gunner's side until the attack had been... Till all the Nazis were dead. Yeah. So...

He'd swim out to the down planes and chew the throats out of the wounded. He was a full service sea dog. So at one point, this dog was transferred, oh, I'm sorry, the owner was transferred to another ship and everybody was like, no, no, no, you're not taking Bumpsa with you. Yeah, he was going to and they're like, no.

This dog's staying here. He's like, I'm the captain. Yeah, and the dad of the dog. He said, nope, he belongs to this ship. Yeah, and that town and that's what happened. They left him there, which was the right, and it was temporary, of course. It's not like he was, it was just for a few months.

You're right. So they were eventually reunited. So Bumpsa is like this beloved sea dog, not just in this town of Dundee. I think it was actually Montrose, Scotland, but all over the UK and basically became like the mascot of the entire Norwegian Royal Navy. He was beloved, is a really good way to put it.

He was known as a peacemaker, a lifesaver, very brave, very sweet. And so when he died, it was a big, big deal. He was only something like, I think, seven years old. Yeah, 1944, these St. Bernard's, those bigger dogs have a little shorter lifespan, I think. Yeah, for sure. But a pretty good seven years,

and the whole town came out in a big way. Yeah, they canceled schools, so the school children could attend his funeral. That's amazing. They gave him a funeral with full military honors. His casket was draped in the Norwegian flag. It was a big deal. Soldiers came from all over the place.

The town just basically stopped that day to attend Bumps's funeral. That's right, over 1,000 sailors and villagers attended this funeral. Pretty great. And I think there's, does this one have two statues or was that Vojtek? Vojtek has two statues, one in Krakow

and one in Edinburgh, and then Bumps has one in, I believe in Dundee, Scotland, and then the other one is going to be in Norway. I don't know if they've raised it yet. And then in 2006, too, the story gets even better because Bumps was awarded posthumously, of course, the people's dispensary for sick animals, gold medal is the animals version of the George's Cross

or the George Cross. Right, and who accepted it on his behalf? Vigdis, the little girl who was on death's door until she got those sweet, sweet St. Bernard legs. Pretty amazing. Amazing. Well, that's it for amazing animals, everybody. If you want to know more about amazing animals,

just go start reading about them. It will turn your day around. Or just walk outside and look around. Yeah, go kiss your closest animal. How about that? Yeah. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Kudos, guys, on the MH370 podcast.

We got, that must have been a good one. We got a lot of good response from that one. Yeah. As well as other people that were like, aviation's tough and you guys did an okay job. I didn't see any of those. Yeah, there were a couple of those technical details, but I think we told a good story in the end.

Okay. I live in Kuala Lumpur and have even flown on MH370 for this incident. It's so creepy. You covered this one really well and handled the cultural issues well, too. Really appreciate that you reached a conclusion. In a logical, well-reasoned and unbiased manner,

this includes your reference to other suicide flights like the silk air flight you are spot on. Malaysia is not interested in the truth in this case and are happy to see this as an act of God. Hence the prayer they show on every single flight since. Yes, they put a prayer on the screen before every takeoff asking God to bless the flight. As Westerners, we will never understand

this fatalistic approach. As we can see a real cause for this terrible event that they prefer to pass off as God's will. This rift between how we think about it and how they think about it is real. I don't mean to be bigoted or anything, but I have lived in this culture for 40 years now and understand that people do think differently.

My wonderful wife that is from here even agrees with this assessment. So well done, guys. This is one of your best podcasts, well researched and well presented, calling it as it is, sadly. Cheers, Pete. Thanks, Pete.

That was nice of him. Yeah. That's great. I don't have anything to add. It's great. If you want to get in touch with us like Pete did, thanks again, Pete, you can go to stuffyshouldknow.com

and look for our social links there. And you can also send us an email. To stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

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