Rat torture

Rat torture is the use of rats to torture a victim by encouraging them to attack and eat the victim alive.[1]

History

The "Rats Dungeon", or "Dungeon of the Rats", was a feature of the Tower of London alleged by Roman Catholic writers from the Elizabethan era. "A cell below high-water mark and totally dark" would draw in rats from the River Thames as the tide flowed in. Prisoners would have their "alarm excited", and in some instances have "flesh ... torn from the arms and legs".[2]

During the Dutch Revolt, Diederik Sonoy, an ally of William the Silent, is documented to have used a method where a pottery bowl filled with rats was placed open side down on the naked body of a prisoner. When hot charcoal was piled on the bowl, the rats would "gnaw into the very bowels of the victim" in an attempt to escape the heat.[3]

Rat torture appears in the famous case study of a patient of Sigmund Freud. The Rat Man obsessed that his father and lady friend would be subjected to this torture.[4]

Rat torture was allegedly used in Chile during the regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990)[5] and in Argentina during the period of the National Reorganization Process (1976–1983).[6] The report of CONADEP in Argentina detailed the use of a torture method known as "the recto-scope" (reserved primarily for Jewish prisoners) which consisted of inserting living rats into a victim's rectum or vagina through a tube.[6] Amnesty International documented the case of a woman tortured by the Chilean CNI (National Intelligence Agency) in 1981, who described being kept in a room full of live rats during interrogation.[7]

On October 16, 2010, in Lakewood Township, New Jersey, David Wax was alleged to have threatened kidnap victim Yisrael Bryskman with rat torture unless he agreed to give his wife a get. He was eventually sentenced to 7 years imprisonment as a consequence of the 2013 New York divorce torture plot.

In fiction

An erotic comic by Eric Stanton depicting rat torture

Rats feature in the Edgar Allan Poe story The Pit and the Pendulum. The narrator lies on the rack, and can only watch as a scythe swings back and forth, approaching closer each time, as rats swarm over his body.[8] The narrator later manages to make the rats eat through the straps.

An account similar to the Sonoy torture appears in the 1899 Octave Mirbeau novel The Torture Garden, and psychologist Leonard Shengold has identified this as the possible source of the story that the Rat Man told Freud. Part of the book, an imaginary dialog between a torturer and a beautiful woman who is sexually excited by the accounts, is set in China.[9]

The threat of rat torture occurs in Nineteen Eighty-Four.[10] The central character, Winston Smith, is arrested by the Ministry of Love, and undergoes a process of mental reprogramming. The ministry imprisons him in Room 101. Here Winston must face his greatest fear: rats. A cage filled with hungry rats is placed over his head, their only source of food or escape being by eating their way through Winston's face. At this point Winston breaks and begs that the method actually be used on his lover Julia, a sign that he has finally been broken.

Rat torture was featured in Sergio Corbucci's 1970 film Compañeros, where Thomas Milian's character is tortured in the desert by Jack Palance on a rock.

In the 1991 novel American Psycho, the narrator Patrick Bateman performs rat torture on a kidnapped woman by cutting open her vagina enough to fit a plastic tube into and forcing a rat to crawl into her vagina. He removes the tube, staples her labia together, then watches as the rat eats the restrained woman from the inside out.

In the 1997 Fantasy novel Temple of the Winds, rat torture was used on the character of Cara. The insane Drefan Rahl, in an attempt to learn the location of his brother, the protagonist Richard Rahl, uses a heavy chain to tie a cauldron to her stomach, then shoved rats under the rim of the pot. He put hot coals on the top, causing the rats to claw at Cara to try to get away from the rising temperature inside the pot. Resisting the torture she nearly dies, but is saved at the last moment by Richard and Kahlan. The television show based on the books, Legend of the Seeker, depicts Cara in her youth being tortured by rats as part of her mord sith training. The 2003 movie 2 Fast 2 Furious features a very similar scene where antagonist Carter Verone tortures a police detective into distracting cops so Brian, Roman Pierce and two thugs can escape with several bags of money. In this case however, a blowtorch is used to heat a metal bucket.

Rat torture was used on a victim in the 1999 film, The Bone Collector.

Rat torture was exhibited in the television series Game of Thrones. In "Garden of Bones", the fourth episode of the second season, the head torturer, "The Tickler", and an assistant place a live rat into a metal bucket, which is fastened to the victim's abdomen. The bucket is then heated at one end using a torch, forcing the rat to gnaw into the bowels.

A metal bucket containing a rat with hot charcoals on top was used as a method of killing in the 2015 horror-movie, Sinister 2.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Cameron, Mary (1931). Merrily I Go to Hell: Reminiscences of a Bishop's Daughter. the Canton Rat torture, in which enormous half starved rats are put into a box with the victim, who is rapidly eaten alive
  2. ↑ George Lillie Craik; Charles MacFarlane (1848). The Pictorial History of England. Harper & Brothers.
  3. ↑ John Lothrop Motley (1883). The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Bickers & Son.
  4. ↑ Leonard Shengold (1971). "More about Rats and Rat People". International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. 52 (3): 277–288. PMID 5106163.
  5. ↑ Simmons, Elizabeth (2009). Torture Under Pinochet's Regime. p. 12.
  6. 1 2 Nunca Más (Never Again); Report of CONADEP. 1984.
  7. ↑ Chile: Evidence of torture: an Amnesty International Report. London (Amnesty International Publications) 1983, pp. 35–37
  8. ↑ Kevin J. Hayes (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-79727-6.
  9. ↑ Jorge Ahumada (Summer 2005). "Review of Mental Zoo: Animals in the Human Mind and its Pathology". Publications: Book Reviews. American Psychological Association Division of Psychoanalysis. Retrieved 2008-01-27.
  10. ↑ Christopher Boorse, Roy A. Sorensen (March 1988). "Ducking Harm". The Journal of Philosophy. 85 (3): 115–134. doi:10.2307/2027067. JSTOR 2027067.

External links

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