what is a poop knife? Weapon or not?

POOP AS AN EARLY CHEMICAL WEAPON

Although people eventually realized that poop and other bodily fluids are the cause of epidemics , there have been several instances where people have used poop as a kind of primitive bioweapon.

The first example I came across was that of the Scythians, a Eurasian nomadic people who lived from the 9th century BC to the 4th century AD. One of their warfare specialties was the use of poisoned arrows, which, according to the book Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World(Greek Fire, Poisoned Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Chemical and Biological Warfare in the Ancient World), were submerged in a mixture of viper venom, snake carcasses, human blood, and poop. If the arrows hurt a person, they could cause gangrene and tetanus (due to blood and poop), as well as other infections from snakes. “Even people who were not injured by the poisoned shells suffered from the terrible smell,” said Strabo, a Greek geographer.

A short time later, during the Middle Ages, the feces of the victims of the bubonic plague were catapulted into castles to infect those inside.

A slightly more advanced version of the catapult poop was used in twelfth-century China, according to the book Siege Weapons of the Far East (1): 612-1300 , by Stephen Turnbull. The weapon, which the author calls “a dung bomb,” was a kind of explosive device made of hemp thread and filled with gunpowder, human excrement, and poison, with a fuse that was lit before being thrown at the enemy.

This tradition of people having no weapons at hand and using their shit as a substance to humiliate and infect continues to this day. Last year, the LA Times reported that the number of times inmates at the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail have thrown their cerotes and other bodily fluids at officers has increased fivefold. “Prisoners often mix their waste with jam to make it easier to stick to their target,” the newspaper noted. “The Tapatío hot sauce manages to make a good mix. Milk cartons are used as containers and sometimes as missile launchers to launch the substance through a small opening.”

PARIS, EARLY 1940S: SHIT MILITARY SPRAYER

Who Me was a secret weapon developed by the Office of Strategic Services (a defunct US intelligence agency) during World War II.

Although the weapon didn’t actually contain feces, Who Me was inspired by human poop, which is why I’m including it here. The weapon was a stinking chemical that was sent to members of the French Resistance in the form of small atomizers.

The purpose of the device was to be sprayed on German officers to humiliate them in front of their colleagues, since they would smell as if they could not control their sphincters. “Imagine the worst dumpster left for a long time in the hottest summer sun and that will give you a little taste of what the Who Me was like ,” Pam Dalton, a cognitive psychologist, told New Scientist in 2001.

Who Me turned out to be a failure, since it was impossible to impregnate someone with such a stinking chemical without impregnating yourself when spraying it.

It is not clear if the weapon was ever used in combat. But if it was, I imagine its victims didn’t suffer as much for having led a Nazi life.

NORTHERN CANADA, 1950s: THE INUITS POOP KNIFE

As far as I could tell, there’s only one documented case of someone using a knife made of frozen shit like the guy who commented on my article wanted to use to kill me.

Wade Davis, a Vancouver anthropologist and ethnographer, has repeatedly told the story of an old Inuit who made a knife out of his frozen poop to escape the Canadian government.

Wade says it was a family he met in Arctic Bay, an Inuit community in northern Canada, that told him the story.

In the 1950s, the Canadian government forced the Inuit to settle in the high Arctic. The Arctic Bay family claimed that his grandfather did not want to be relocated and so he decided to defy government orders and stay where he was.

The family, fearful of the repercussions the grandfather could face if he refused to cooperate with the relocation plan, took the man’s tools and left him in his igloo with nothing more than two dogs. As the story goes, they did this so that the man would feel that he had no choice but to follow them north.

“They need to understand,” Wade explained in a 2007 show , “that the Inuit are not afraid of the cold; rather, they benefit from it.”

“What he did was come out, pull down his sealskin pants, and defecate on his hand. And as the feces started to freeze, he shaped them into a knife,” Wade added.

Once the fucking knife was ready, the man is said to have killed a dog with it. Later, according to the television series Canada: A People’s History , he skinned the dog, used its skin to make a coat, its ribs to make a sled, and made a harness out of its innards.

Having fed himself and the remaining dog some of the dead dog’s meat, the man put the entrails harness on the live dog, attached the poop knife to his belt, and sled off into the darkness of the night. night.

VIETNAM, SIXTIES: PUNJI STAKES

During the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong used a simple, but effective (and gross) weapon known as punji sticks.

Punji were made from sharpened bamboo sticks that were dipped in human excrement (or sometimes plant or animal poison). The poo-filled spears were usually placed on the ground and covered with leaves or were on top of a trap door and the enemy was expected to fall into it. The stakes didn’t always kill people who fell on them, but I guess it wasn’t fun getting stuck in you.

RUSSIA, 2009: POOP CANNON

Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov, a Russian inventor with some 200 patents to his name, filed one more in 2009 called “Biological Waste Disposal Method from Sealed Military Armored Compartment and Device for Its Implementation.”

This, in non-patent terms, means a device that allows tanks to shoot human excrement.

The idea is that when a soldier inside the tank feels like shitting, they do it in a kind of casing that has enough space to contain both their poop and an explosive charge. This is then placed in the tank’s cannon and fired at the enemy to fill them with shit.

This is practical for two reasons: First, it would remove human waste from the tank, which is an enclosed space that soldiers must share for a long time. Second, it would cover his enemy and the surrounding area with poop, which the inventor said had “psychological and political effects on the military.”

ARIZONA, 2014: SHITTING IV

Last year, 65-year-old former nurse Rosemary Vogel, of Chandler, Arizona, was charged with attempted first-degree murder after injecting fecal matter into her husband’s IV.

Her husband, Philip, was recovering from heart surgery at Chandler Regional Hospital when nurses heard his IV alarm indicating a problem. When they entered the room they found Rosemary fiddling with the IV line. Upon inspection they found a brown substance on it. After testing her in the lab, she turned out to be poop.