• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Rat Kings / Ratkings

A

Anonymous

Guest
Would someone please explain what a "rat king" is? I remember having heard the term sometime but I haven't been able to find any info on the net about it. Is it a term describing really large rats or is it supposed to be a cryptoid species of its own. Btw how large can rats grow? :confused:
 
A rat king is a bunch of unfortunate rats with their tails tied together. This is supposed to happen accidentely, and indeed it's hard to imagine anyone managing to do it on purpose. One can also have squirrel kings and presumably anything with a tail long enough can get itself into this (fatal) predicament. :(
 
Terry Pratchett's 'The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents' has a Rat King in it.

There was also a Rat Queen who would seduce young men. She looked human except she had claws for nails and her eyes would catch the light in an animal-like fashion. The children of this union were said to have one blue eye and one brown. She tended to leave a bite on her 'unfortunate' male 'victim'.
 
I did too!!!!!

And it put me off putting down rat traps in the barn for all of one week!!!!!

Then the rats took advantage of my kindness & I fought back!!!:mad:
 
beakboo said:
A rat king is a bunch of unfortunate rats with their tails tied together. This is supposed to happen accidentely, and indeed it's hard to imagine anyone managing to do it on purpose. One can also have squirrel kings and presumably anything with a tail long enough can get itself into this (fatal) predicament. :(
Click to expand...
They are also ment to have a pscyhic control over other rats. There's a good rift on the subject in Alan Moore's 'The Ballard of Halo Jones' amazon link where the rat king is a banned weapon of genocide, capable of infecting whole planets with the plague and tyhphus:cross eye
 
I was sifting through some old books a while ago, and found a page devoted to these 'freaks of nature'.

I was so excited, in fact, that I've changed my avatar to a well-known picture of one :D

Unfortunately, that's the only one I could find.

Could anyone spread some light on how these rodents just group together and become tied?

Is there just some really sick guy out there with a lot of free time, who buys little mice, ties them together by the rear, and laughs as they roll around?

If anyone finds a nice link/photograph, I'd be delighted to know about it...

Thanks,

Nick
 
panix.com/~sjl/wonder/lewis/ratking/rat_intro.htm
Link is dead. MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/2004041...om:80/~sjl/wonder/lewis/ratking/rat_intro.htm

The MIA webpage states:

"Those tales of great rodent nations marching into battle are pure myth, ratologists say, but no one really knows the rat’s full capabilities. Surely there are many stories of rat cooperation and even compassion. A good example is the famous Rattenkonig or "rat king". Young rats close to one another in the nest sometimes get their tails entangled and become a living Gordian knot glued together by dirt encrusted wounds and the like. When they try to pull apart the tails are pulled tight, and the knots strengthen, knitting the rats together. As many as 32 rats are trapped in these knots and have died as a result of being unable to forage for themselves. However, they are often unselfishly fed for life by other family members."

(Cited from:) More Cunning than Man: a social history of rats and men; Robert Hendrickson; Dorset Press, New York; pp. 92 - 93.

worldlingo.com/wl/Translate?wl_lp=DE-EN&wl_fl=2&wl_url=www.ronsens.de/844.html
Link is dead. No archived version found.

sureshot
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Rear one ronsens
Equal property the photo of the rat king taken up to my collection.Thanks.By coincidence 6 glass slides with a rat king, a squirrel king and several Siamnesi cat boys (zoo-logical Institut University of Hamburg have approx.. 1955) found and eingescanned.With interest send ' to me ' ne mail and you can it copy.
(Orginal Scans are over 2MB largely, also too
received).
Click to expand...

Ooh, I'd like to see those!
Anyone got them to post? Or a link?
:)
 
There's definately been a rat king photo in FT. If anyone can find it they win a prize.
 
I had a picture of a squirrel king that I had meant to send in to FT but misplaced in a move. This was published in the Gainesville (FL) Sun some time between 1990 and 1993 if anyone has access to their archives.
 
beakboo said:
There's definately been a rat king photo in FT. If anyone can find it they win a prize.
Click to expand...

boo fach

theres pictures in "the best of fortean times" pages 174-175
 
Yep, I'm looking at the pages melf is talking about. There's a full page photo of an X-rayed tangle of rats.

The caption that goes with it reads:

The rat king was found in the winter of 1963 by a Dutch farmer in Rucphen, North Brabant, who heard loud squeals coming from a pile of bean sticks in a barn. Upon further investigation, he discovered a rat king consisting of seven adult blacks, five females and two males, all of similar age. The X-ray of the knot showed some fractures, with signs of callus formation, and there were also fractures in some vertebrae. This suggest that the tails had been knotted together for some time, perhaps originally becoming entangled when the animals had crowded together in a nest, and that the rats had tried desperately to free themselves.

Here's about as good of a pic of it as my webcam can capture.
 
Thanks Melf and Ogo, does it say which FT issue it came from? (Just for the sake of thoroughness, and sheer bloodymindedness.)
 
Doesn't say, but the book, which is called The World's Most Incredible Stories: The Best of Fortean Times, was published in 1992.
 
Well this is creepy. I've just been packing stuff, and that book has been dragged out of the cupboard and left on the floor next to the computer. I only just realised. I should post this on the Coincidences thread.
 
Terry Pratchett includes some interesting theories on rat kings and a brief epilogue about them in one of his books. Something like 'the Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents'.
 
nickedoff12 said:
Could anyone spread some light on how these rodents just group together and become tied?
Click to expand...
They're born that way and they're apparently not THAT uncommon, it's just uncommon for them to be found because the rat collective look after them. but the chances of it happening are apparently higher than any other species so its believed there's more than what's been encountered...probably happens a lot. As I understand it they eventually die, but the collective try to keep it alive.

Weirder than that and a hell of a lot less common are Squirrel Kings. What's weird is, in order to keep the squirrel king alive a squirrel will give up near enough its entire harvest and squirrels from all around will come to give their offerings. ok, so they're like rat kings, but they are less common.
 
HI EARL HERE, about 10 years ago, i was working with a builder called sam, and was working over bedfordshire on a farm. The farmer wanted the barn taken down and replaced with a brick shed. Well we took the barn down and cleared up then sam said look over here and there was a RATKING A RATKING is a CIRCLE OF RATS WITH THER TAILS KNOTTED TOGETHER IN THE CENTER. There must have been 15 rats there in the circle. They were all dead and was told that sometimes when rats are born they get there TAILS KNOTTED TOGETHER............. TO SEE A RATKING GO ON GOOGLE IMAGES............ CHEERS EARL............
 
No, it's a ratking, one word.
 
king rat or rat king

Some people SAY KINGRAT AND SOME SAY RATKING ... WELL WHAT IT IS, THE THING IS WEIRD.... EARL......
 
ttaarraass said:
Here's a squirrel king.
Click to expand...
That is a screen-busting image!
Needs two-way scrolling to see it all.
Can't see the wood for the trees!

But it wouldn't really lose anything if it was downsized as it's not that detailed.
 
Unfortunately, the phpbb software doesn't offer a way of setting the size of an image (and the board's style sheet doesn't include a max-width property), so I've just taken the image out altogether.
 
They're saying that pine resin stuck their tails together, they have bushy tails so I can understand this happening, but what would cause rats tails to do the same? Or could it be that previous cases of rat kings were in fact squirrel kings?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top