I was looking up something on Wikipedia the other day and stumbled into War, which has a long list of recognized wars broken down by the number of deaths attributed to each. I scanned down the list, opened a few up in new tabs, and found an interesting entry at the bottom. With a total of 0 deaths, the Pig War slots in just under the Falklands War (in which 907 perished).

Wikipedia has it as:

The Pig War was a bloodless confrontation in 1859 between American and British authorities over the boundary between the United States and British North America. The specific area in dispute was the San Juan Islands, which lie between Vancouver Island and the North American mainland. The pig was the only intentional casualty of the war making it essentially bloodless. The Pig War, so called because it was triggered by the shooting of a pig, is also called the Pig Episode, the San Juan Boundary Dispute or the Northwestern Boundary Dispute.

Now this is a war I could get behind. My sympathies to the pig that got shot, but I wish all wars could be so gentle and hilarious.

The gist of the war, in 100ish words or less is that the US and Britain drew up boundaries between what is now Washington State and Canada that didn’t definitively lay out who owed a handful of islands. The Brits moved in some of their people, the Yanks moved in some of their people, and some Irish guys pig was shot when it broke into an Americans garden. It spiraled up from there to grow to a few thousand British and American soldiers staring down the barrel of each others cannons waiting for the other side to fire. Luckily cooler heads prevailed and Germany eventually settled the matter in the favor of the Americans. The Americans went on to fight the Civil War a few years later and the Brits gave us the Spice Girls.

Link [Pig War on Wikipedia]