In the South American Rain forest between Paraguay and Nicaragua there exists an ant with a poison sting that packs a punch. These ants are 1 inch long. Yes, you read that correctly – an ant that is 1″ long. This ant lives in the trees where it has it’s nest. Before it attacks you for messing with it – and you might not even know you’re messing with it because you might be just walking through the jungle… it SHRIEKS! Yah, it has a war-cry before it attacks you. Is that nuts? Hold on, that isn’t the point of this post… it gets worse. Much worse.
The name of this huge ant is, “Bullet Ant”. That’s a funny name, but for an unfunny reason. The sting feels like you’ve been shot with a bullet. In fact, in the entire Arthropoda Kingdom this 1″ ant ranks number one on the Schmidt Sting Index as having THE MOST PAINFUL sting on the planet.
But wait, I’m building up to something especially farked here…
Some indigenous people in the area have an initiation ceremony for celebrating the passage of a boy into manhood. You know, like a “Sweet 16″ party or something? But these misguided Neanderthals put the kids through hell in order to “become a man”.
They spend a day or so weaving these “leaf sleeves” for the kid to wear. Inside the sleeve are hundreds of these bullet ants woven into the sleeve, stingers inward and facing the arms of the unlucky boy about to “become a man”. They put the sleeve on the kid and immediately he’s stung by these things over and over for 10 minutes. If he makes it 10 minutes, that’s the ‘goal’. When they pull the sleeve off him he is a twitching, convulsing mass of farked humanity. Is he a man? What do you think?Apparently they don’t think he’s a man yet because in order to become a real man, not a girly-man, he’ll need to go through this 20 times – over and over and over before they decide -
“OK, yeah, maybe he’s a man.”
I wonder how many boys turned ladyboy there are in that culture!
In Brazil they make mits (glove type coverings) filled with these bullet ants. The kids endure what the Schmidt sting index calls, “waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours.” NUTS!
Video of guys in Brazil sticking their hands into gloves of these.
They do it for 10 minutes at a time. They do it 20 times!
Traditions in a culture of people can be seriously twisted. Is there any logical reason a kid would need to go through this? Doesn’t a boy become a man anyway after time? Doesn’t a boy, when left alone just spontaneously become a man? It’s so bizarre that some cultures have these pain-inflicting, debilitating initiations into manhood. Military units or secret societies don’t even go through this much bull-shite. This is a young boy reaching a certain age. His life is farked from the start. Knowing this is how they turn a boy into a man it’s likely they have other horrifying practices that are wholly unnecessary…
Who set them up as fighters? Who created the farked existence of all of this mess? If it wasn’t a God, and it may not be at all, then what was it? What the hell conspired to make life on earth so F-A-R-K-E-D for us and the animals that spend time here? It’s like God’s own torture playground.
Who set this culture up? Who creates culture? Ultimately man was created with certain predispositions. What happens in each culture across the world is because of those predispositions. We are born into the world seeing that the strong survive. For some cultures that is more apparent – or more valid than in others. In the case of these South American people, they must really believe that men must be strong mentally to withstand great amounts of pain. To them, that is something very important in life because their lives must be filled with physical pain from fighting or other reasons. Are they ignorant for doing this – we say “Hell YES”. In reality, are they just doing something that is the natural result of the environment and human predispositions they were ‘given’ from the start?Yes. That’s true too. So, this kind of thing goes on.
Bizarre initiations for kids like a girl having her clitoris cut out by some African tribes continues because of ignorance… on one hand, but because they just developed that way as a natural consequence of where they live, how they’ve lived for thousands of years, and what is important to them in life. Every culture creates things that are important, in the past there have been some really outrageously disgusting practices go on… out of ignorance, but really – out of a natural progression of life based on all the predetermined variables that we’ve been given from the start. Nobody develops anything outside of those already given variables – impossible. We develop as we do because we have the possibility to. It’s natural. It’s life as we know it.
It’s such a FARKED LIFE, isn’t it?
For your viewing pleasure a portion of the Schmidt pain index for stinging insects is below, along with someone’s colorful commentary to elucidate the type of pain accompanying the sting:
1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet & reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic & burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.
Want to read the Wikipedia entry on Bullet Ants? >
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