18. Some people were eaten alive by Rats
Rats will eat pretty much anything, alive or dead. Many are the semi-legendary tales of people partially eaten by rats after a fall or non-lethal heart attack, but this tendency was once seen as useful to the state in many countries, rather than annoying. At the Tower of London in Elizabethan times, there was a cell dubbed ‘The Dungeon of Rats’, located below the waterline of the River Thames. At high tide, the local rats would head into the cell to escape the rising water and take advantage of the free meal afforded by the injured and shackled prisoner.
Where the English were content to look the other way and let the rats go about their horrible business, during the Dutch Revolt against Spain in the seventeenth century, the dissident Dutch leader Diederik Sonoy did not want to leave anything to chance. He would bind his prisoners to a table, place a rat in a cage on top of them, and heat it up. The rat would desperately attempt to escape the searing heat by burrowing downwards… through the victim’s chest. In this way, Sonoy extracted crucial information about Spanish movements and, presumably, learned a lot about rodent biology.