Redditor Butterflychunks wanted to hear about the creepy things that rattle around in our brains. They asked:
"What’s an oddly violent fact that you know?"
***WARNING - THIS PIECE CONTAINS SENSITIVE MATERIAL- NC-17***
We really are prone to violence as humans. It's part of the DNA.
Mud
"The number of British soldiers lost to mud alone in the battle of passchendaele is thought to be numbered in the thousands."
Gat_Gat_Habitat
"They had to climb over the bodies of their brothers in arms to get in and out of those hellholes. Bodies were just left there to rot. No bloody wonder the ones who made it home came back with drink/drug/mental problems."
"My great grandad was in the trenches and came back as a violent alcoholic who could NEVER talk about anything he saw. According to my Gran, his daughter, you’d never dare ask him."
thepurplehedgehog
"snow"
"The Dachau concentration camp was located near Munich. While not an extermination camp in the proper sense it still had a crematorium due to the high number of inmate deaths, and often times ash of the burning bodies would 'snow' on the residents and in the streets of Munich. Officials passed it off as local wildfires and the people believed it."
llcucf80
butcherbird
"Well, I think how shrikes kill their prey counts as violent. They literally just stab them on tree branches, cactus spines, whatever nearby. They're nicknamed the butcherbird for a reason."
ElectroshockGamer
"Same for actual Butcherbirds in Australia, they are only distantly related but are pretty much Shrikes Australian counterpart. Also they are songbirds."
SoggyIsland8
‘fighting teeth’
"Male llamas and alpacas have some very sharp lower incisors sometimes called ‘fighting teeth.' Why are they called fighting teeth? When fighting for dominance of a herd (which is a savage display in and of itself) a male will use those teeth to castrate other males, ensuring they can’t mate with the females of the herd. Farmers and breeders will file these teeth down, usually during shearing."
dum_spir0_sper0
“to be fair”
"The Paraguayan War, by some estimates, killed over half the population and 80% of all military aged males in Paraguay."
sd51223
"At one point in the war there were so few men that the military started to use children and preteens. In the battle of Acosta Ñu the Brazilian army literally massacred like 3000 children ('they were disguised so many Brazilian soldiers didn’t noticed they were actual children)."
GT_Troll
War is evil. And violence is unnecessary, but let's continue.
root and all...
"If you have a tooth knocked fully out (root and all), it can go back and live on like nothing ever happened if you get it back into the socket within 45 minutes. After that, the ligament that attaches the tooth to the jaw dies and while you can put the tooth back in (and it will stay there), your body will recognize it as foreign material and resorb it over time."
"Pro tip 1: don't put the tooth on ice. Instead put it in a cup of milk or carry it in your cheek."
"Pro tip 2: don't go to the hospital - a knocked out tooth isn't an emergency and you will wait much longer than 45 minutes to be looked at. Go to the closest dentist - it will be their biggest emergency of the year (possibly of all time)."
Successful_Print681
Animal Cruelty
"When we have to submit animals for rabies testing we have to cut their head off (and make sure we get some of the brainstem too) and send it via fedEx/UPS to a lab."
JOYFUL_CLOVR
"Can confirm. My cat bit a vet tech when I brought her in just before putting her down. They wanted to do a rabies test as I didn't have recent vaccines done as she turned into an indoor cat. Kinda crappy icing on the cake after I went in to be with her when she was put down."
SynisterSly
the USAF...
"When I joined the USAF they took footprints in the manner of taking fingerprints. This is because after a plane crash your feet were still intact in your boots while the rest of you was charred beyond recognition. I was going in as a flight nurse. I imagine they did it to everyone as even in a nonflying role you could be on one of our planes. I’m not sure if this still done. They now have a DNA database of everyone in the US military so they only need a little bit of you to ID your remains."
markydsade
Suffocation
"You would have to hold a pillow over a person’s face for at least 4 minutes before you would actually be able to suffocate them. That’s why you should play dead if someone tries to smother you with a pillow. More often than not, they’ll think the job’s done and you can catch them by surprise."
PandaMandawasabear
WAR
episode 16 crows GIFGiphy"Owls and crows hate each other. It’s in their DNA. Gang wars."
Travisg25
"Wolves and coyotes, too. Wherever wolves are reintroduced, one of the first things they do is maraud around annihilating all the coyotes."
Wrkncacnter112
Identification
"Suicide bombers can often be identified because the blast pressure of a torso-mounted suicide vest separates the head at the weak point (neck junction). So heads tend to pop off and land nearby relatively intact like a tee ball."
Culpersr
Bolt
"If you have a catastrophic malfunction in a bolt action rifle the bolt will jettison backwards and impale you wherever is immediately behind it."
ReideTheProtogen
"My dad once told me a story of a guy this happened to in basic back in the early 80s. Bolt went right back into the fella's forehead. Understandably, he died."
Inevitable_Problems
"The Canadian Ross Rifle from WW1 was infamous for this."
2ByteTheDecker
BOOM!
"Boiler explosions (like a steam train or ship) may look like quick and painless but in reality they are slow and painful as you literally get cooked alive by steam."
"I work designing replacement systems for mechanical rooms and am often around large firetube boilers which have been in operation since the 1960s (some decades older than that). I always assumed (hoped?) if something went wrong it would just explode violently and I wouldn't even have time to register what happened. This was something I didn't need to know."
walkingcarpet23
In the Trees
"When Flight 93 crashed, the body parts and personal effects of the passengers were scattered into the nearby woods. Tree climbers had to retrieve as much as they could from the treetops."
Ranger176
"More on this… one of my teachers in high school worked this scene, he was an FBI agent in Pennsylvania at the time."
"He said they could see pieces from the flight in the trees. As they got closer they could see limbs and pieces of internal organs and such. I asked if they were given free therapy, and he said yes. We had a whole lesson and PowerPoint on the tragedy and his experience on 9/11."
snackaddict0420
Cures
"Lobotomies were performed by sticking an ice pick through someone's eye socket (above the eyeball) and then tapping a hammer to drive it through the thin bone at the back of the socket and into the brain. The doctor would then swing the pick around, basically scrambling the brain, and then remove the pick."
"They claimed this cured mental illness by calming people down but really all it did was 'cure' mental illness by making people unable to make decisions at all or basically making them severely brain damaged to the point they couldn't even care for themselves anymore or have complete thoughts. The last lobotomy was performed in 1967."
stitchmidda2
Cracked
Will Ferrell Elf GIF by filmeditorGiphy"You can crack a skull open easier with a bottle than you can break a bottle over someone’s head."
ipsdirtleg
Covered
"9/11 happened when I was in college. A guy I had a class with's girlfriend was a rescue dog handler. She went out to assist in the rescue, and came back with PTSD because the dogs would come out of the ruins covered in human blood. Just covered. That possibility had never occurred to me."
Ruby_Tuesday80
Torture
"Lingchi, translated variously as the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, and also known as death by a thousand cuts, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly 900 CE up until the practice ended around the early 1900s. It was also used in Vietnam and Korea. In this form of execution, a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death. (documentary in link)."
Bhanghai
Levels
"Genghis Khan's forces killed so many people they lowered the worlds carbon levels."
TheInnerMindEye
That is way more information than I needed. I already have nightmares.
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