The following article is a regular column in the Exeter Flying Post by longstanding contributor Sinbad McCaffrey
The other day I was discussing rats with a friend of mine. She has lived in the country all her life and, though her exact age is moot, she is definitely past retirement. You see, I keep chickens - not a lot, but enough to have the splendid ability to convert food scraps into enough eggs for us.
Part of the original idea was to stop the rats that were living in our compost heap from having a source of cooked food. There are always rats about but if they find easy pickings they breed very fast, and you end up with tunnels and a problem with your neighbours. I was explaining that we had simply moved the rat problem from our compost heap to the chicken run, and that our new rat-trap was catching one or two a day, which I then had to drive up the road and release miles from anywhere.
She suggested that this was sentimental of me and that I should drown them or something, and I told her that last week we had trapped two large rats simultaneously and that one had killed the other. The surviving rat was very cross when I found it, and with many bites and scratches. This tale reminded her of what her father and many others used to do when there was a rat problem, and she explained how they used to create a Master Rat. I will tell you about it now, but first I must say that I have no intention of following her advice.
Rats are sociable creatures with sophisticated social rules and hierarchies and seem to be able to co-exist fairly peacefully in large numbers, but if they are stressed they become very aggressive. To create a Master Rat one must first catch a large and aggressive rat and put it in a bin with only a dish of water. When it is good and hungry you feed it a dead rat and so you go on. When it is really big you give it live rats that you have trapped and it gets a taste for them. Now you have a Master Rat, and, when you release it, it will then decimate its fellows and sort out your rat problem. I didn’t mention to my friend the worrying thought that now you had instead a huge and highly trained killer rat.
I thought also I would tell you about some research I came across recently. It was discovered, in the 2nd World War and during psychological research during the Vietnam War, that soldiers very rarely tried to kill the enemy during battle and that the great majority of enemy casualties were inflicted by just a few soldiers that aimed to kill. When psychologists investigated further they found there was a very strong, near universal, human inhibition to killing others, and that overcoming it often resulted in severe psychological problems later for the soldier involved.
Army strategists realised that this made a mockery of the majority of the army and that this inhibition led to a huge waste of effort. So they set about devising a way of training their men in ways to prevent this inhibition from affecting their ability to carry out their orders.
The first of the two main techniques was to train their men to fire at suddenly appearing, realistic, targets in chaotic conditions until it became an automatic response. The second technique was to use weapons and systems that allowed people to kill in a more disembodied way, and to train soldiers using simulators (sophisticated computer games). Thus the enemy becomes perceived as just another simulated target and the inhibition is circumvented in another way.
Of course this training may later be responsible for a far greater level of psychological trauma for the returning heroes, but by then they will be out of the army and of no further use.
It may be that this article does hang together after all.
Yours sadly, Sinbad McCaffrey.
