In continuing to follow my interest in animals and animal-human relations in the Southeast Asian past, I was looking around the web site for the Imperial War Museums for information about mules in Burma during World War II.

Mules were used to transport weapons and goods for the Chindits, a British special forces group that entered Burma from India and fought the Japanese, and they are mentioned quite often in the oral interviews on the Imperial War Museums web site of soldiers who served in the Chindit expeditions.

So it looks like one could use what humans have written and said in order to write a history of mules in World War II Burma. What one could not do, however, is to incorporate a “mule voice” for that history.

The reason why this would be impossible is not simply because mules don’t speak human languages, but because the mules that carried weapons and supplies for the Chindits were actually “de-voiced” in India before they headed off to Burma... (read more at: http://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/the-silenced-mules-of-world-war-ii-burma/)