Rat torture

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Rats may be used to torture a victim by encouraging them to attack and eat him alive. This is supposed to be a traditional form of Chinese punishment. [1]

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, Diederick 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 attempt to escape by "gnaw[ing]] into the very bowels of the victim".[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]

According to an account in the New York Times, during the 1970s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency trained interrogators in the Honduran Army to use psychological techniques including putting rats and cockroaches in prisoners' cells, and giving prisoners dead rats in place of meals.[5]

[edit] In fiction

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.[6]

The threat of the torture occurs in Nineteen Eighty-Four.[7] The central character, Winston Smith, is arrested by the Ministry of Love and undergoes a process of mental reprogramming. When it is clear that this programming has been unsuccessful, the ministry imprison him in Room 101. Here Winston must face his greatest fear: rats. A cage filled with 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.

Rats also 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, and rats swarm over his body.[8]

This form of torture was used in the movie 2 Fast 2 Furious. Carter Verone (the main antagonist) tortures a police detective into distracting cops so Brian, Roman Pierce and two thugs can escape with several bags of money. Carter takes a rat and holds it with a bucket on top of the stomach of the detective that is being restrained. He then takes a butane torch and proceeds to heat up the bucket to make the rat claw into the detective's skin.

[edit] 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 and 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: 277–288. 
  5. ^ Anthony Lewis. "ABROAD AT HOME; Raw Dead Rats", The New York Times, June 9, 1988. Retrieved on 2008-01-27. "Mr. Caballero was a sergeant in the Honduran Army. He said he had been an interrogator in a death squad that tortured and murdered about 120 people. For six months in 1979 and 1980, Mr. Caballero said, he and 24 others were trained in Texas, by C.I.A. men and others, in psychological methods to get information from prisoners without physical torture: "Make [ the prisoner ] stand up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him."" 
  6. ^ Jorge Ahumada. "Review of Mental Zoo: Animals in the Human Mind and its Pathology", Publications: Book Reviews, American Psychological Association Division of Psychoanalysis, Summer 2005. Retrieved on 2008-01-27. 
  7. ^ Christopher Boorse, Roy A. Sorensen (March 1988). "Ducking Harm". The Journal of Philosophy 85, No. 3: 115–134. 
  8. ^ Kevin J. Hayes (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521797276. 

[edit] See also