This thread has interested me a great deal: I had never before heard this bit of fascinating news about rats.
But I would like to call your attention to how explosive rats might be used to help win a war, or at least to terrorize an enemy (are you listening Donald Rumsfeld?). In an article in The Guardian in 1999, it was reported that the British SOE (special operations executive)--which was a covert group set up during WW II "to help resistance movements carry out sabotage and subversion, or as Churchill put it, 'set Europe ablaze'"--had planned to use rats packed with explosives in acts of sabotage. Excerpted below is the relevant passage from the article. The article also described other "ingenious" ways to deliver explosives to an enemy. Jeff ----------------------------- [from: "How exploding rats went down a bomb - and helped British boffins win the second world war" by Richard Norton-Taylor (Wednesday October 27, 1999; The Guardian)] http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,261091,00.html A hundred of the rodents were procured by an SOE officer posing as a student needing them for laboratory experiments. The rats were skinned, filled with plastic explosive, and sewn up. The idea was to place a rat among coal beside a boiler. When they were spotted, they would immediately be thrown on to the fire, causing a huge explosion. That was the theory. As one of the SOE files records: "This device caused considerable trouble to the enemy, but not quite in the way that was intended." The Germans intercepted the container of dead rats before they could be used for "operational purposes". But all was not lost. According to an SOE report, their discovery had an "extraordinary moral effect": the rodents were exhibited at all German military schools, prompting a hunt for "hundreds of rats the enemy believed were distributed on the continent". SOE concluded: "The trouble caused to them was a much greater success to us than if the rats had actually been used." -- Jeffry P. Ricker, Ph.D. Office Phone: (480) 423-6213 9000 E. Chaparral Rd. FAX Number: (480) 423-6298 Psychology Department [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scottsdale Community College Scottsdale, AZ 85256-2626 Listowner: Psychologists Educating Students to Think Skeptically (PESTS) http://www.sc.maricopa.edu/sbscience/pests/index.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
