Talk:Rat King (Cryptid)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WikiProject Echo has identified Rat King (Cryptid) as a foreign language featured article. You may be able to improve this article with information from the German language Wikipedia.

	Mammals Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mammals, a project to improve Wikipedia's articles on Mammal-related subjects. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
Assessment comments This article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.

	This page is within the scope of WikiProject Cryptozoology, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on cryptozoology and cryptids on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)

[edit] Writing style

What does "seek their own comfort" mean? Please use plain english and avoid euphimisms or idiomatic constructs.

[edit] Myth?

In the German Wikipedia there is ongoing discussion if rat kings do actually exist, or if they are just a hoax. An editor is claiming that all examples of rat kings are artificially constructed, i.e. forgeries. I searched in literature and internet, but I neither found evidence nor counterevidence of the existence of rat kings. The following arguments are raised by the sceptics:

• Rats are cleanly animals, so it is unlikely that they stick together by blood and dirt
• All exhibits in museums are very old, mostly from the 17th and 18th century, and no scientific analysis of the finds was made
• Today thousands of rats are kept and watched in scientific labs, and never a rat king was observed

Does anyone here know about the credibility of the rat king stories? Thanks -- Baldhur 13:45, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think your chances of dissecting one of these exhibits is low, and the chance of a new occurrence of the phenomenon even lower. I don't see any reason not to just label the whole phenomenon an old wives' tale. It's just a jackalope whose origins are a little more shrouded in the dust of history. --Yath 21:37, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

What I know about rat kings comes from Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents - a fictional story of course, but Pratchett researches his information very well, and it is clear that they are mythological creations invented by man, not real. I'd recommend rewording the article a bit, and adding it to Category:Fictional species - MPF 08:52, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Well, it is not that clear. In Grzimek's Animal Encyclopedia they are treated as an unproved but possible phenomenon (though my edition is an old one from the 1970s). In Walker's Mammals of the World rat kings are not mentioned at all. Hence the question is, if Grzimek is in error. I sent e-mails to a zoologist at the Frankfurt University and to the Altenburg museum (which keeps an exhibit of a rat king). I hope that one of them will reply, and I'll tell you as soon as I get an answer. If anyone here has access to literature besides Terry Pratchett, I would be glad to hear about it.

Thanks for your answers so far. -- Baldhur 10:58, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It is possible that they are connected upon being wounded and entangled. According to observations by Robert Langer and Joseph Vacanti, rats posses the capacity to preserve human organs such as ears with the use of their own circulation.

Yes, but only if the tissue has been grafted on, like most animals. I can't conceive of a way this would happen spontaneously. 144.136.44.182 00:39, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

FYI, there is another preserved example of a rat king in the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand. From memory, I believe it was a bunch of baby rats whose tails had grown together. If anyone local wants to check it out, it's in the 'Animal Atttic'.Topatientlyexplain 07:40, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Check the Estonian paper. Also see the X-rays. These things are either not manufactured, or were manufactured with the rats still being alive (fat chance...). The Estonian paper notes that almost all reports and all specimens are a) Rattus rattus and b) come from cold-temperate regions. It proposes that the tails become tangled initially either by nesting material (such as horse hair, see the Rucphen case) or by freezing muck (the 2005 Estonian case), and that the rats are tied together by their attempts to escape. The argument of rats' comfort behavior holds no water - of course the rats would try to get themselves unstuck, but if they cannot, they simply cannot.

This is not a common phenomenon. It is likely that few observed cases were unreported, especially in modern times, yet black rats are common animals. A roundabout hoax theory can be dismissed I think, because the material evidence in at least 2 cases, probably more, disagrees. This does not mean that "rat kings" have not been fabricated as a curio of course. But not all known specimens are fabricated. Dysmorodrepanis 14:03, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fictional Character

Wow, two things this article seems to very obviously be missing are A. Reference to the Rat King from the 80s TMNT cartoon B. Any attempt at etymology, I mean.. .rat -king-? Why are a bunch of stuck-together-rats a king? German word I'm not aware of? The article briefly mentions one explanation that is false, but that's all.

It isn't obvious to me. Why don't you put the cartoon reference in the article. --Yath 21:23, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I notice that since this comment (and the accompanying paragraph in the article) was created, a disambig link has appeared to the article on the fictional character. Given that, is a paragraph on the fictional character still appropriate for this article, or would a single sentence (like other the fictional appearances mentioned in the article) be more appropriate? 156.34.221.174 14:45, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't have a sorce for this, but I think in folk lore rat kings have mind control over normal rats. That's how they get the rat peasants to feed it. OrdoAbChao 07:08, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External Link

Removed the Scientific American link because it had nothing to do with rat kings whatsoever. Soonercary 06:00, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] only half of the article shows up

Even on preview. --HanzoHattori 22:33, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Someone forgot to close a ref tag, so everything after the tag wasn't being rendered. This should be fixed now... --Starwed 03:31, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citation for date found

The 1564 date quoted in the article that says "citation needed" can be found in Martin Hart's "Rats" on page 67 in the chapter on Rat Kings. Published by Allison & Busby, 1982. English translation by Arnold Pomerans. ISBN 0-85031-297-3.

The date refers to an illustration by Johannes Sambucus that accompanied a poem describing seven rats tied together.

I can't quite figure out how to format the citation correctly. Fenrislorsrai 22:46, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Article move

Why was this moved from "Rat king" to "Rat King (Cryptid)"? The only rationale in the edit summary is the adjective "Grammatical", but capitalising something which remains uncapitalised throughout the article seems to go against MOS:TITLE, and I'm not sure why this article was chosen to gain the cryptic "Cryptid" category, while the minor Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villain gets to take the default unbracketed page.

Any support or feedback on moving this article back to "Rat king" and moving the cartoon villain to "Rat King (TMNT)"? --McGeddon (talk) 17:52, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

The "minor" Rat King villain is a lot more famous than the cryptid, and it's tremendously more likely someone searing for the Rat King is searching for the cartoon character. 76.28.193.166 (talk) 02:46, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with the show, but the article suggests that he's a minor villain who hasn't appeared much since the 1980s cartoon. The two articles seem about evenly split in the number of other articles that link to them, and a quick Google search shows the wider Internet to be mentioning the two contexts more or less equally - there's no "tremendously more likely" to either of them. --McGeddon (talk) 08:48, 3 June 2008 (UTC)