Poop is always the cheapest deterrent and poison
Although poop has always been used in a variety of ways, including as a building material, you might not know that it was and still is used as a weapon over the years.
A chemical weapon
According to this article, the Scythians were a central Eurasian nomadic people that lived from roughly the 9th century BC through the 4th century AD, and they are the earliest example we can use to explain the use of excrement as a weapon. According to the book “Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World“ one of their specialties during battle was the employment of poisoned arrows, which were tainted with a mixture of viper venom, viper corpses, human blood, and excrement.
Infections from the vipers, as well as gangrene and tetanus (from the blood and poop), could result from the arrows wounding a person. Anyway, the odor of the arrows already acted as a deterrent.
Years later, throughout the Middle Times, catapults were used to launch the bubonic plague victims’ feces over castle walls in an effort to infect those within.
In his book with the title “Siege Weapons of the Far East (1): AD 612 – 1300“, Stephen Turnbull describes the deployment of a slightly more sophisticated variant of the shit catapult in 12th-century China. The weapon was a form of explosive manufactured from hemp string and filled with gunpowder, human feces, and poison before being lit with a hot poker and thrown at the enemy.
This practice of people using their excrement to humiliate and infect others has persisted up until today. In fact, in lack of other weapons, it was found that prisoners at the Los Angeles Men’s Central Jail, for example, have thrown their excrement and other bodily fluids at guards. They also sometimes mix poop with fruit jelly, so there’s a better chance that it will stick to their target.
Military shit spray
During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (a now-defunct US intelligence agency) created Who Me, a top-secret weapon.
Who Me was significantly influenced by human waste even though the weapon didn’t actually contain any excrement, the smell was similar. The actual weapon was an offensive chemical that was delivered to French Resistance members in small atomizers.
The device was designed to be sprayed on German officers in order to make them appear embarrassed in front of their peers by making them smell like they were unable to control their bowels. According to cognitive psychologist Pam Dalton, “Imagine the worst garbage dumpster left in the street for a long time in the middle of the hottest summer ever-and that gives you a taste of the Who Me quality”.
Who Me ultimately failed since it is simply impossible to use a chemical that has such an offensive smell without also contaminating everything in its proximity, including the person who sprayed it. In addition, whether the weapon was ever employed in battle is not totally clear.
The Inuit shit knife
Wade Davis, a Vancouver, Canada-based anthropologist and ethnographer, told the story of an Inuit elder who made his shit into a knife in order to elude capture by the Canadian authorities. Wade claims that an Inuit family he encountered in Arctic Bay, a community in northern Canada, told him the anecdote.
The Canadian government forcibly relocated Inuit people to settlement camps in the high Arctic in the 1950s. The Arctic Bay family asserted that their grandfather had chosen to violate the government’s directives and remain there rather than move.
The grandfather’s tools and equipment were taken away by the family, who were worried about the consequences if he refused to assist with the resettlement plan. The grandfather was then left in his igloo with only two dogs. According to the story, they did this with the intention that the man would believe he had no alternative but to move north with them.
Wade explained that “the Inuits did not fear the cold, they took advantage of it”.
“He simply slipped outside, pulled down his seal skin trousers, and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped them into the form of a blade”, Wade added.
The man is claimed to have butchered a dog with the shit knife after it was set. Then, he skinned the dog, using its skin to form a coat, its rib cage to build a sled, and its guts to create a harness, according to the television program Canada: A People’s History.
The man attached the gut harness to the other dog, holstered the poop knife in his belt, and went out into the night after eating the dead dog’s meat and giving some to the other dog.
Punji sticks
The Viet Cong, instead, employed punji sticks, a crude but efficient weapon, during the Vietnam War.
The bamboo sticks used to make the punjis were sharpened before being immersed in human feces (or sometimes poison from plants or animals.) The spears encrusted with poop would be buried, hidden by vegetation or a trap door, and left for the adversary to stumble upon. Although the sticks rarely killed the victims who fell on them, being stabbed with one was hardly the most enjoyable experience ever.
The shit cannon
“Method of Biowaste Removal From Isolated Dwelling Compartment” was the title of a 2009 patent application by Aleksandr Georgievich Semenov, a Russian inventor with almost 200 patents to his credit. This is a device that would enable tanks to fire human feces.
The concept is that a soldier in a tank would poop into a particular kind of shell casing that has space for their poo and an explosive charge. The enemy would then be covered in feces once the shell was loaded into the tank’s gun and fired.
This is helpful in two ways: First of all, it would remove human waste from the tank, an enclosed location where soldiers are frequently required to spend extended periods of time. Second, it would cover the opponent with crap, having “additional military-psychological and military-political effects”, as explained by the designer.
Shit injections and poisonings
Attempts to use excrement as a poison have also been made since an intestinal parasite outbreak in Edinburgh in the middle of the 1980s was linked to someone purposefully dumping contaminated poop in an apartment building’s water tank.
In 2014, instead of injecting her husband with feces, Rosemary Vogel, a 65-year-old former nurse from Chandler, Arizona, was charged with first-degree attempted murder.
At Chandler Regional Hospital, where her husband, Philip, was recovering from heart surgery, caregivers overheard an alert from his IV pump, suggesting a problem. The nurses entered the room and saw Rosemary manipulating Philip’s IV line. They investigated and discovered a brown substance in the line that was then identified as excrement after being tested there.
Afterward, nevertheless, her husband attended Rosemary’s court appearance to defend her. He said during his testimony, “There was some psychological break that morning”, “It was totally out of character”. Rosemary admitted guilt despite saying she couldn’t recall what happened.
Rosemary received a one-year sentence of weekends in jail after the judge expressed sympathy for her and said he thought she had a mental breakdown that day.
However, other similar episodes have already happened. It was allegedly done to a woman called Stephanie McMullen’s two-year-old son in 2005. Stephanie is a registered nurse, just like Rosemary. And in the middle of the 1990s, instead, a woman called Kathy Bush attracted national notice for purposefully poisoning her daughter’s IV with crap. Then, a mother in West Virginia is said to have been captured on tape performing the same act on her nine-year-old last year.
Furthermore, a California kid poisoned her mother in 2010 by putting dog excrement and insecticide in her diet. Luckily, the mother made it through.
