📸 Sparrow, Sparrow; War Against Sparrows from Mao Zedong to the King of Prussia

The war on sparrows, or the campaign to eliminate sparrows, is one of the strangest and most disastrous environmental and management events in human history, which began in 1958 on the order of Mao Zedong, then the leader of China. This campaign was part of Mao’s socio-economic program called “The Great Leap Forward.”

With the logic that removing sparrows would save millions of tons of grain and address the food shortage, Mao, alongside rats, flies, and mosquitoes, introduced sparrows as one of the “Four Pests” and enemies of the Chinese people, and issued the order for their complete destruction.

The entire population of China was mobilized to carry out this order, and by destroying up to 2 billion sparrows, the bird was pushed to the brink of extinction.

Ignoring the complexity of the ecosystem and the food chain led to an explosive increase in the population of locusts and other pests, the destruction of agricultural crops, and a major famine in 1960 in China, in which between 15 and 55 million people died due to starvation.

In 1960, Mao ordered the halt to the slaughter of sparrows.