Cujoronimo IV: The Early Years
We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have long been worried about the possibility of a Saint Bernard hurtling down from the sky on our collective carapace, so to speak. This is not all that unusual an occurrence as we have documented here, here and here. But it is with shock and outrage that we report that it was none other than the United States government that taught large dogs how to skydive.
The Allied airmen and women of World War II were certainly brave and skilled in battle, but even they couldn't win the war on their own.
Plagued in the early, low-tech years of the war by dangerous afflictions such as altitude and decompression sickness, pilots got some help behind the front lines from a team of American physiologists who studied the effects on the body of flying.
Their research, which involved at least one parachuting dog, and the technology it initiated was a key to the Allied victory in the air, says Jay B. Dean of the University of South Florida College of Medicine.
"[Pilots] had two enemies — they had the enemy shooting at them and they had the unseen enemy, which was the environment," he said. "The physiologists knew that they had to do something to learn to protect the health of the war fighter."
Dean presented his research at a recent Experimental Biology conference in San Diego and is working on a book about Allied advances in aviation physiology……
…..One doctor made a high-altitude jump himself to experience the strain on the body, nearly killing himself, and was able to calculate exactly when an airman's parachute should be opened to limit the impact of the g-forces, said Dean. And "Major," a 145-pound St. Bernard dog, was also tossed from a plane at 26,000 feet to test parachute straps at a high altitude.
Sporting his own custom oxygen mask, Major dog-paddled all the way down and landed safely, witnesses said.
While we applaud the scientists who helped win the war, we are also mightily dismayed by this. The next time you find yourself laid low by a skydiving Saint Bernard, a paragliding poodle or even a free-falling fox terrier, you know who to blame.





