The Lair Of The Rat King

I have kept and handled rats, I know them inside out, rats tails becoming intertwined is physicaly impossible. Their tails are made up cartelege & gristle, bending it or 'tying' it would cause the rat immense distress & pain. The tail does NOT bend to the degree required to tie up in knots.

My theory on 'rat kings' is a litter of babies born this way, like siamese twins if you like. I doubt their life is long or enjoyable, once one rat in the 'king' died, the others would either cannibalise it, or it would carry infection that would wipe the group out. Also their ability to outrun predators would be seriously hindered, if at all possible, they would fight to the death if nothing else.

I think the German one is a fake, conjoined litters is possible, but highly rare, and the whole rat king thing is coined to cause the fear of rats more than anything else.

On the whole, domesticated rats are pretty sweet, hundreds of them are bred every day, so if this was at all common, it would happen in captive bred rats as well.

The 'dumbo' rat is very adorable, although again, it is an exploited fault that could well have serious implecations in further generations. Maybe as this goes on, we'll see a man made 'rat king'.

Also, please remember at the time of the German mummy one, the fear and paranoia about rats was extreme, creating such a fake back then, nobody would have questioned it, the fear was already there, and someone jumped on the bandwagon. Perhaps a rat catcher with no fear of the rodents decided to somehow bind them together one night after too much ale? just a thought, on the skeptical side of things.

[edit on 25-6-2010 by The Chez]

reply to post by The Chez


Hi The Chez,

I kept rats myself for years and also wondered if this would be true. I believe the domestic rats we kept would be varieties stemming from the Norwegian Brown rather than the Black Rat. From what i've been reading Black rats have longer, more flexible and more prehensile tails, which would explain why the reports or Rat Kings deminished in line with Nowegian rat displacing the brown.




I found this really good paper on the most recent Rat King discovery in Estonia in 2005

Rat Kings in Estonia

There's some interesting points raised in this.

On the basis of the data presented above, the following conclusions may be
drawn.

1. Estonian finds support the hypothesis that the rat kings knot is created after the rat tails are glued or frozen together at least two kings out of three were found in very cold winters.
2. Analysis of the worldwide geography of rat kings finds demonstrates that with one exception (Java) they occur in the regions where two factors coincide: cold winters and the presence of the black rat.
3. Estonian finds suggest that the occurrence of rat kings may be more frequent than presumed. Not all rat kings that arise are found by people, and not all finds are reflected in the press, much less in scientific papers.

This subject is so interesting. Although I also find it hard to believe that any rats could be stupid enough to get their tails tied together!

Maybe it's a game that rats play.
Maybe it a precursor to having a rat orgy.
Maybe the kinky rats get together as a group, stick their tales out and start playies footsies with their tales in an attempt to latch on to a partner.

I find this to be a rather hard tale to swallow.

If it were true I'd expect the rats to not chew off their own tail to get away, I'd expect them to chew off the other rats' tails to get away.

Super Glue and Twister don't mix. That should have known it was a terrible idea even if they are rats.

It was more prevelant b4 the brown rat replaced the black rate. Their tails can become bound together with dirt, blood, excrement, etc... One was found in New Zealand bound by horse hair and feces. The ones in your pic survived for awhile, they found callouses.

Someone said a rat's tail was gristle and cartilage. That is incorrect. A rat's tail has 3 layers. The innermost is bone, vertebrae. The middle is tendons with blood vessels running between the tendons. The outer layer is skin.

When the rat's body temp increases a few degrees the vessels in the tail expand. The tail serves as a heat loss organ... When the temp cools, the vessels contract. So I imagine if there were a high density of rats and it were cold and the tails intertwined then their body heat caused the tails to expand a bit it combined with the hardened excrement, blood etc... I can see how they could become permanently bonded.

reply to post by DrJay1975

That would seem to be the most comprehensive answer, especially given the correlation between rat kings and cold weather that Nammu highlighted earlier.

Thank you for adding that. Mystery solved?

very strange how do they get about i wonder

Very interesting. It has been a long time since something so original has been posted. However, I am not sure how rat tails would become entangled since they are very thick and don't really bend in a way that would cause them to become entangled. The idea of an 'elephant graveyard' is intriguing since it could be possible that if a mass death of rats happened their tails could become mummified and entangled? hmm?

Perhaps Some kind of ritual craft,
(rats are collected, put to sleep, tied up, and what rage their telepathic intelligent wake minds radiate collected or directed on to.. )

But yeah, can you imagine to decode humans, from all the information that has been collected from all the nature from eyes of trees to frees.. who we are why we do ? If any of these traits are originally only on humans, this might be big wonder for the Eye itself.

Rats Temple in India (or tourist, trap)
www.youtube.com...

Originally posted by Alxandro
What a horrible way to go.
The harder you try to escape, the tighter the knot gets.

Maybe someone from India can chime in, they really love rats in India.

This is also know to happen with worms. They stick into Themselves creating a huge nest. They try to escape but create more knots and end dying. They don't see to posses any intelligence to escape on situations like this as we humans do. I don't remember almost dying because my shoes decided to knot for themselves

Anwyay here's an example with worms:

I find it rather odd that their tails can get tangled like that. But hey, antlers can get tangled so why not rat tails. Someone else pointed something out that made a lot of sense, the rats look like they are fully grown, so what did they have a little get together and accidentally get tail tied?

It kind of makes me wonder if for some old religious, or superstitious belief, someone knotted the rat's tails up as opposed to some freak accident. Just a thought.

I know from experience rodents can be born with theyre tails all attached, I found 6 squirrels all attached by the tail. They mustve been about a month old.
How they survived i dont know but they were buried under branches in a brush pile.
They couldnt coordinate theyre movement, as every squirrel tried escaping in a different direction so we called animal control who then, very forcefully i might add, clipped the tails at the base and let the last one walk away with a large mass of fur attached to its tail.
The humor of the situation is when they started hopping like rabbits right away after removing the tail, climbing small eared tree rabbits. I would add the picture but dont know how to on my phone.