If, as Vicki Hearne wrote in her 1991 essay “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights,” happiness in animals is the fulfillment of “a capacity for satisfactions that come from work in the fullest sense,” then joyful indeed was the Scots homing pigeon White Vision, which, in 1943, crossed 60 kilometers of windswept ocean to alert rescuers to the position of a disabled American flying boat. Blissful, too, were fellow birds Winkie, which the previous year aided the crew of a downed British torpedo bomber; Beach Comber, which carried news from France to Britain of the commencement of the Allied attack on Dieppe; and Kenley Lass, which, in 1945, successfully delivered a communiqué from an intelligence agent deep in Nazi territory to the agent’s handlers in Shropshire. For their efforts, all four pigeons were awarded the Dickin Medal, a prize given as warranted by a prominent U.K. veterinary charity to animals that serve heroically in theaters of war. And thus, for a moment, were matters between man and the lesser creatures ordered rightly.

The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) has awarded the medal 70 times since 1943. Pigeons account for 32 of the recipients. Dogs account for 33, including Mali, a Belgian Malinois who, on the hunt for explosives, sprinted twice through enemy fire during a 2012 deployment to Afghanistan. Salty and Roselle, Labrador retrievers who led their sight-impaired owners down more than 70 floors of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks, were awarded the medal in 2002. Four horses have been awarded the medal, and so has one cat: Simon, a feral feline smuggled aboard HMS Amethyst in 1949 by a 17-year-old English seaman, only to spend the near-disastrous Yangtze Incident—in which the British sloop became trapped on that river for three months late in the Chinese Civil War—rooting out the ship’s rat infestation, thus protecting the ship’s food supply. The animals selected are part of the millennia-old story of domestication that has shaped nearly every facet of the human experience; in honoring them, we acknowledge that world-shaping partnership.