Ancient Rome holds a mythic place in our imaginations. It’s the land of historical epics like Ben-Hur and Gladiator, where men in golden armor ride chariots and emperors are fed grapes in reclining chairs.

Real life in Rome, though, was quite a bit less glamorous. In a time before modern sanitation and medicine, getting through an average day was a difficult task—and far more disgusting than you could ever imagine.

10 People Washed Their Mouths Out With Urine

In ancient Rome, pee was such big business that the government had special taxes in place just for urine sales. There were people who made their living just from collecting urine. Some would gather it at public urinals. Others went door-to-door with a big vat and asked people to fill it up.

The ways they used it are the last ones you’d expect. For example, they’d clean their clothes in pee. Workers would fill a tub full of clothing and pee, and then one poor soul would be sent in to stomp all over the clothing to wash it out.

Which is nothing compared to how they cleaned their teeth. In some areas, people used urine as a mouthwash, which they claimed kept their teeth shining white. In fact, there’s a Roman poem that survives today in which a poet mocks his clean-toothed enemy by saying, “The fact that your teeth are so polished just shows you’re the more full of piss.”

9 You Shared a Sponge After Pooping

Rome has been praised for its advances in plumbing. Their cities had public toilets and full sewage systems, something that later societies wouldn’t share for centuries. That might sound like a tragic loss of an advanced technology, but as it turns out, there was a pretty good reason nobody else used Roman plumbing.

The public toilets were disgusting. Archaeologists believe they were rarely, if ever, cleaned because they have been found to be filled with parasites. In fact, Romans going to the bathroom would carry special combs designed to shave out lice.

The worst part came when you finished. Each public toilet, which was shared with dozens of other people, would have a single sponge on a stick that you used to wipe yourself. The sponge would never get cleaned—and you shared it with everybody else there.

8 Toilets Regularly Exploded

When you entered a Roman toilet, there was a very real risk you would die.

The first problem was that creatures living in the sewage system would crawl up and bite people while they did their business. Worse than that, though, was the methane buildup—which sometimes got so bad that it would ignite and explode underneath you.

Toilets were so dangerous that people resorted to magic to try to stay alive. Magical spells meant to keep demons at bay have been found on the walls of bathrooms. Some, though, came pre-equipped with statues of Fortuna, the goddess of luck, guarding them. People would pray to Fortuna before stepping inside.

7 Gladiator Blood Was Used As Medicine

Roman medicine also had its fair share of eccentricities.

Several Roman authors report people gathering the blood of dead gladiators and selling it as a medicine. The Romans apparently believed that gladiator blood had the power to cure epilepsy and would drink it as a cure. And that was just the civilized approach—others would pull out the gladiators’ livers and eat them raw.

This was so popular that when Rome banned gladiatorial combat, people kept the treatment going by drinking the blood of decapitated prisoners. Strangely, some Roman physicians actually report that this treatment worked. They claim to have seen people who drank human blood recover from their epileptic fits.

6 Women Rubbed Dead Skin Cells Of Gladiators On Their Faces

The gladiators who lost became medicine for epileptics while the winners became aphrodisiacs. In Roman times, soap was hard to come by, so athletes cleaned themselves by covering their bodies in oil and scraping the dead skin cells off with a tool called a strigil.

Usually, the dead skin cells were just discarded—but not if you were a gladiator. Their sweat and skin scrapings were put into a bottle and sold to women as an aphrodisiac. Often, this was worked into a facial cream. Women would rub the cream all over their faces, hoping the dead skin cells of a gladiator would make them irresistible to men.

5 Pompeii Was Filled With Obscene Art

The volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii left it wonderfully preserved for archaeologists. When they got their first look at it, though, the archaeologists found things that were so obscene that they hid them from public view.

Pompeii was filled with art that was so filthy that it was locked in a secret room for hundreds of years before anyone was allowed to look at it. The town was full of the craziest erotic artwork you’ll ever see—for example, the statue of Pan sexually assaulting a goat.

On top of that, the town was filled with prostitutes, which gave even the street tiles their own special little touch of obscenity. To this day, you can walk through Pompeii and see a sight Romans would enjoy every day—a penis carved into the road with the tip pointing the way to the nearest brothel.

4 Dangerous Places Had Drawings Of Penises For Good Luck

Penises were pretty popular in Rome. They didn’t share our skittishness toward the male member. Instead, they displayed them proudly. Sometimes, they even wore them around their necks.

It was a fairly common Roman fashion choice for boys to walk around wearing copper penises on necklaces. This was about more than looking good. According to Roman writings, these would “prevent harm from coming” to the people who wore them.

They didn’t stop there, either. Good luck penises were also drawn on dangerous places to keep travelers safe. Sharp curves and rickety bridges in Rome often had a penis drawn on them to grant good luck to every passerby.

3 Romans Hold The First Recorded Mooning

Rome holds the unique distinction of recording the first mooning in history. Flavius Josephus, a Jewish priest, wrote the first description of a mooning while describing a riot in Jerusalem.

During Passover, Roman soldiers were sent to stand outside of Jerusalem to keep watch in case the people revolted. They were meant to keep the peace, but one soldier did a little bit more. In Josephus’s own words, the soldier lifted “up the back of his garments, turned his face away, and with his bottom to them, crouched in a shameless way and released at them a foul-smelling sound where they were offering sacrifice.”

The Jews were furious. First, they demanded that the soldier be punished, and then they started hurtling rocks at the Roman soldiers. Soon a full-on riot broke out in Jerusalem—and a gesture that would live on for thousands of years was born.

2 Romans Vomited So They Could Keep Eating

Romans took excess to new levels. According to Seneca, Romans at banquets would eat until they couldn’t anymore—and then vomit so that they could keep eating.

Some people threw up into bowls that they kept around the table, but others didn’t let themselves get so caught up in the formalities. In some homes, people would just throw up right there on the floor and go back to eating.

The slaves are the people you really need to feel sorry for, though. Their jobs were terrible. In the words of Seneca: “When we recline at a banquet, one [slave] wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath, collects the leavings [vomit] of the drunks.”

1 Charioteers Drank An Energy Drink Made Of Goat Dung

Romans didn’t have Band-Aids, so they found another way to patch up wounds. According to Pliny the Elder, people in Rome patched up their scrapes and wounds with goat dung. Pliny wrote that the best goat dung was collected during the spring and dried but that fresh goat dung would do the trick “in an emergency.”

That’s an attractive image, but it’s hardly the worst way Romans used goat dung. Charioteers drank it for energy. They either boiled goat dung in vinegar or ground it into a power and mixed it into their drinks. They drank it for a little boost when they were exhausted.

This wasn’t even a poor man’s solution. According to Pliny, nobody loved to drink goat dung more than Emperor Nero himself.

Mark Oliver is a regular contributor to . His writing also appears on a number of other sites, including The Onion’s StarWipe and Cracked.com. His website is regularly updated with everything he writes.

Egypt is the land of pyramids and pharaohs, tombs filled with glittering treasures, and powerful men who ruled a country like gods. When we think of ancient Egypt, we think of the wealth and glamour of kings. But we usually leave out the dirty—and disgusting—details.

10 Lice Was So Bad That People Just Gave Up On Hair

Most people shaved their heads in ancient Egypt. We know this from pictures and from records written by people in other countries who looked at Egypt’s fashion choices and puzzled over why Egyptians thought going bald was such a good look.

Today, though, historians are pretty sure they know why. Lice were everywhere in ancient Egypt. The tombs of Egyptian rulers are infested with lice, apparently flooding out from the remains of the bodies.

The ancient Egyptians had lice remedies, but they either didn’t work or weren’t worth the hassle. Most people got so fed up with the nationwide infestation that both men and women shaved every hair clean off their bodies. Women usually wore wigs—hair that could be discarded when it got infested—while some others just went around completely shaved from head to toe.

9 Egyptian Women Were Regularly Flashed By Men In Passing Boats

Catcalling isn’t a new invention. Women today might get frustrated when a man whistles or yells out a lewd comment, but that’s nothing compared to what women in ancient Egypt endured.

The Greek historian Herodotus watched Egyptians get together for a religious festival. Men gathered their families together into boats and sailed toward the city of Bubastis for a deeply spiritual and sacred ceremony.

But going to a sacred ceremony didn’t stop men from flashing girls on the way. According to Herodotus, the men would “cry aloud and jeer at the women” and “pull up their garments” as they passed through the towns. Apparently, the men held onto that distant hope that a girl might get so excited that she’d jump into the water and swim after them.

8 King Tut Was Buried Erect

When Howard Carter found the untouched tomb of King Tutankhamen, he discovered a wealth of treasures and relics the likes of which historians had never seen before. The world was abuzz with writings of every single thing found in there—except for one little detail that usually gets left out.

King Tut’s mummy was buried with an erection. Nobody knows exactly why, but Tut’s the only Egyptian ruler we’ve found so far who insisted on being mummified with a raging hard-on.

There are a lot of theories, some crazier than others. According to one theory, the erection might not really be his. Some people think that his embalmers switched his real member with that of a more impressive donor.

7 Egyptian Birth Control Was Disgusting

The Egyptians had their own ways of practicing planned parenting. For the time, these were amazing innovations that show the ancient Egyptians had an incredible interest in and understanding of medicine. But that doesn’t mean these methods weren’t horribly disgusting.

Women had a few options for birth control, including different mixtures for contraceptives. Some of the nicer ones involved honey, but the braver women mixed tree leaves and crocodile dung. Then the woman had to stick that concoction inside herself—or else deal with nine months of pregnancy.

Men weren’t off the hook, though. They had male contraceptives that weren’t much better. Men had to rub onion juice onto their foreskins to keep themselves from having kids.

It’s not clear how many people actually used these contraceptives. But given the choice, the ancient Egyptians had a strong argument for staying celibate.

6 Beautiful Women Were Left to Decay To Stop Necrophilia

When a man died in Egypt, he was embalmed right away. Women, though, were a different matter. By law, the beautiful and the powerful weren’t sent to embalmers until they had decayed for three or four days. This was because Egyptians didn’t trust the embalmers to keep their hands to themselves.

This wasn’t just paranoia. It was something that the Egyptians learned the hard way. An embalmer left in charge of mummifying a royal body was caught in the act by a coworker. The coworker ratted him out, and the Egyptians learned from their mistakes. After that, Egyptian rulers didn’t even trust their workers with dead women.

5 The Pharaohs Were Horribly Obese

Most drawings of pharaohs show them as thin, muscular people, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. The pharaohs ordered their artists to make them look pretty, but the real bodies we’ve found left behind tell a different story. Most members of the Egyptian royalty were massively overweight.

Egyptian rulers had terrible diets. Their priests were ordered to prepare three banquets each day, all overflowing with wine, beef, and cake. They scarfed down food filled with saturated fats all day.

Mummies have been found with clogged arteries, bulging bellies, and massive fat folds. Obesity was a reality for Egyptian pharaohs. They were so familiar with it that the Egyptians were already writing medical texts on the dangers of obesity as early as 1500 BC.

4 The Egyptians Took Laxatives Three Times A Month

Egyptian royals were very concerned about overeating. They might have been fat, but that didn’t mean they wanted to be. Slim, muscular frames were still the beauty standard for Egyptian men. So they did what they had to do to keep themselves healthy.

Most Egyptians would take laxatives three days each month. They used a laxative made of castor oil and then got ready to spend the rest of the day on the toilet. This was before plumbing, of course, so that meant they had to clean up their mess by hand afterward.

There wasn’t a problem that they couldn’t fix with laxatives. Even diarrhea was treated with laxatives. Apparently, the idea was to get the disease out of their bodies by force and get through the whole mess as quickly as possible.

3 Egyptian Proctologists Were Called ‘Shepherds of the Anus’

Medicine was a major part of ancient Egyptian culture, and they made some incredible advances for their time. Like we do today, ancient Egyptians had doctors for every body part of the body. They had dentists for their teeth, optometrists for their eyes, and of course, proctologists for their backsides. Or, to translate the Egyptian word for “proctologists” literally, “shepherds of the anus.”

Proctology had only come so far at the time, so the job of a shepherd of the anus mostly consisted of giving people enemas. Proctologists were specialists who knew exactly how to concoct and administer medications that go up the buttocks and who didn’t really do anything else with their time.

The Egyptians were proud of their enemas. They even had a whole myth behind them. Enemas, they believed, were developed by the god of Thoth and then passed on to man—making Thoth a sort of Prometheus of the anus.

2 Egyptian Fertility Tests Were Disgusting

Egyptians had a whole medical system for giving birth. They had ways to test fertility and pregnancy that were truly advanced for their time—and incredibly weird.

To test fertility, some doctors would rub oil all over a woman’s body and tell her to lie down until the morning. If she looked “fresh and good,” they ruled that she was fertile. If she didn’t, they said she wasn’t fertile.

Others did something a bit weirder. A doctor would put a clove of garlic or an onion inside a woman’s vagina. In the morning, he’d smell her breath. Ancient Egyptians believed that every orifice in a woman’s body was linked and that their mouths had tubes that went all the way down.

If the doctor could smell the garlic, then the tubes were clear and the woman was fertile. But if the doctor couldn’t smell garlic, the tubes were blocked and the woman couldn’t give birth.

1 The Ancient Egyptians Believed That Men Menstruated

Ancient Egypt was plagued with diseases. In particular, schistosomiasis infected nearly everyone there. It’s an illness that makes people feel sick and causes blood in the urine and stool. It was so common that they didn’t even realize it was a disease.

Ancient Egyptians got schistosomiasis so often that they just thought they were menstruating. They accepted that men had to menstruate just like women, and they accepted the blood coming out of their bodies as a normal part of growing up.

Peeing blood was even treated as a bit of a good thing. They believed that a man who menstruated was fertile. To the Egyptians, there was no better sign that a man was ready to father a family than being infected with parasitic worms.

In the era of the great monarchies, the royal families of European nations were people of dignity and culture, above the low and filthy lifestyles of the poor. At least, that’s what they wanted people to believe. The reality, though, is a bit different. There was enough inbreeding between the monarchs of Europe to spark some strange decisions—and some truly disgusting lifestyles.

10 Henry VIII Had A ‘Groom Of The Stool’

Among his many reforms, King Henry VIII introduced an all-important job to the English monarchy: the groom of the stool. One lucky boy, chosen from the sons of his most trusted nobles, got the job of following the king around with a portable toilet.

The groom of the stool needed to be ever vigilant. He was expected to watch the king as he ate, make notes of what he consumed, and prepare for the job to come. When the moment came, the groom would help the king undress and then clean up his mess.

This was actually a highly respected job. The groom of the stool was trusted with unparalleled intimate access to the king. He also got to live in the castle with a handsome salary.

Wiping up after the king of England became a proud tradition that continued for almost 400 years.

9 Christian VII Pleasured Himself So Often That It Became A National Crisis

Denmark’s 18th-century King Christian VII knew no love greater than his own hand. He spent so much time at it that the Danish government organized meetings to figure out what to do about it.

The doctors who looked after him were convinced that chronic masturbation was the cause of all his problems. Christian VII was mentally ill, afflicted with porphyria. In reality, mental illness was probably the root of his masturbation problems.

His chief physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, wrote a whole book about Christian’s “masturbatic insanity.” When Struensee couldn’t get the king to put his pants back on and focus on ruling a kingdom, the doctor ended up taking over. He did most of Christian VII’s decision-making for him, which freed up some time for the king to follow his passions.

8 Joanna Of Castile Traveled With Her Husband’s Dead Body

Joanna of Castile, the mother of Emperor Charles V of Spain, spent the better years of her life married to a man known as Philip the Handsome. Apparently, she thought Philip deserved his nickname because she refused to let anyone bury him when he died.

Instead, Joanna kept her husband’s dead body in her room. Over 12 months, while Philip’s body slowly decayed, Joanna went on acting as if he was still alive. Whenever someone asked, she would simply insist that he was asleep and would wake up soon.

She would sleep with the body at night, and she would make the servants treat it with the respect due to a king. In a fit of jealousy, she wouldn’t let any women enter the room with the dead body, apparently worried that they would be overwhelmed by lust.

7 King Charles II Kept A Wig Of His Mistresses’ Pubes

In 1651, King Charles II started a new project. Every time he slept with a woman, he plucked a few hairs from under her skirt. Then he stitched them all together into a wig that gradually grew into an unnervingly thick mane of female hairs.

When the wig got big enough to cover a man’s head, Charles II donated it to a Scottish drinking club called the Beggar’s Benison Club. They loved it so much that they wore it during their ceremonies. One person even stole it and used it to start his own club, where he made people kiss it.

In 1822, King George IV took up the tradition again and kept a box full of his lover’s lower locks for his own collection. Like Charles II, George planned on making them into a wig but tragically died without ever fulfilling his dream.

6 Queen Maria Eleonora Slept With Her Husband’s Heart

Queen Maria Eleonora didn’t love her husband, King Gustavus Adolphus, for his power or his money. She loved him for his heart. When he died, she had his heart ripped out of his body so that she could sleep with it.

Maria Eleonora kept her dead husband’s organ in a golden box that she placed above her bed each night. On some nights, she even made their daughter climb into bed with her so that she could be close to her father’s heart.

It was a traumatizing experience that her daughter never forgot. She later wrote that her mother was horribly abusive and never stopped crying, saying that she “carried out her role of mourning to perfection.”

5 King Farouk Had The World’s Largest Porn Collection

Legend has it that King Farouk of Egypt had the greatest and largest collection of pornography in the world. He boasted that he had “warehouses full of the stuff” scattered around the world, with whole storage compartments filled to the brim in Rome, Monaco, and Cairo.

Writer and former pimp Scott Bowers claims that he convinced Farouk to ship several crates of porn to the famous sexologist Alfred Kinsey. According to Bowers, the crates arrived filled almost exclusively with pictures of Arab men with young boys.

When Farouk’s empire fell, looters scavenged his porn collection. Little pieces of it started showing up around the country, flooding a market with a whole new type of monarchy memorabilia.

4 King Adolf Frederick Ate Himself To Death

Swedish King Adolf Frederick had a habit of eating a dessert called semla, which is a sweet roll filled with cream. This, in itself, is not disgusting, but he ate so many that it killed him.

In 1771, the Swedish king sat down to a meal of lobster, caviar, and every other decadent food you can think of. When the meal was done, he wolfed his way through 14 semlas in a single sitting.

When he managed to stand up, his stomach, unsurprisingly, was bothering him, and he died shortly after. He went down in history as the king who ate himself to death—which wasn’t totally fair. King Henry I of England had already died from eating too many lamprey eels, apparently unable to get enough of the slimy taste.

3 King James I Only Cleaned The Tips Of His Fingers

According to a less than flattering description from Sir Anthony Weldon, King James I wasn’t the most hygienic person. Legend has it that King James never bathed, and according to Weldon, James needed to.

“His tongue,” Weldon wrote, was “too large for his mouth.” Whenever James drank, the liquid would dribble down the side of the king’s chin. James wouldn’t do much about it. “He never washed his hands,” Weldon claimed, “only rubbed his fingers’ ends slightly through the wet end of a napkin.”

This was apparently the only type of hygiene the king ever practiced. It might have been out of necessity. King James made regular use of his fingers. According to Weldon, they were “ever in that walk fiddling about his codpiece.”

2 Charles VI Didn’t Change His Clothes For Five Months

King Charles VI of France was horribly mentally ill. He would break into fits where he would run wildly through his home. On other days, he became convinced that he was made of glass and would not move a single muscle. The worst bout lasted for five long months—during which he did not bathe or change his clothes even once.

For nearly half a year, the king just stayed very still and carefully tried to avoid bumping into anybody. Then, at last, he had a brief moment of lucidity that lasted long enough for someone to change him and to clean what must have been the most disgusting pair of pants in history.

1 Louis XIV’s Throne Doubled As A Toilet

Of all the people in history, French King Louis XIV must have been the smelliest. His throne doubled as a toilet, and he would use it while conducting court sessions.

One would expect the court to notice the smell. But when Louis XIV was in the room, there were enough smells going around already to block it out. The man only bathed three times in his entire life, which was on the low side even by 17th-century standards.

The king made up for the stench by filling his rooms with flowers and dousing himself in perfume. In fact, he had a team design him a new perfume every week.

He would also change his shirt three times a day, which he firmly believed was all one really needed to do to stay clean. Like the toilet, his wardrobe changes were never affairs to be done behind closed doors. Every morning, the king of France called 100 men into his room to watch him while he got dressed.

The Greeks were philosophers. They were the fathers of democracy, men of a more civilized time who lived lives of meaning in the pursuit of truth.

On paper, anyway. Everyday life, though, was less glamorous than the few shining moments that made their way into history. Real life in ancient Greece was difficult, dirty, and often truly disgusting.

10 Your Doctor Would Taste Your Earwax

When you visited a doctor in ancient Greece, you could pretty much count on him reaching into your ear and taking a little nibble of your earwax. That was how your doctor got a diagnosis: He’d taste your bodily fluids.

Of course, doctors had more diagnostic tricks than just tasting people’s earwax. The doctor would choose the test depending on the symptoms. For example, a doctor might run his fingers through your phlegm or lick your vomit to see how sweet it was.

All this started with Hippocrates—the man behind the Hippocratic oath. He believed that the body was a collection of fluids and that each bodily fluid had a specific taste. Greek doctors were taught what those bodily fluids should taste like so they could know if something was wrong.

According to Hippocratic medicine, urine was supposed to taste like fig juice. So if you felt a little under the weather, your doctor would take a little sip—and if your urine wasn’t tart enough, he knew there was a problem.

9 People Wiped Themselves With Stones

Toilet paper didn’t make its way to Europe until the 16th century. Before then, people had to find their own ways to clean up. Like the Romans, the Greeks would sometimes clean themselves with a sponge attached to a stick—but not every Greek was so lucky.

More often, the Greeks would clean themselves with stones. They kept a pile of pebbles at their lavatories and grated hard stone against their bodies to clean up. Apparently, these were hard to come by. The Greeks had a saying to encourage a little frugality in the bathroom: “Three stones are enough to wipe.”

Other times, they’d take broken shards of ceramic pots and scrape themselves clean with that. Particularly vengeful Greeks might etch their enemies’ names onto a piece of pottery, shatter it, and use it to wipe their own butts.

It might not be a coincidence that hemorrhoids were a major problem in ancient Greece.

8 Older Men Would Trade Roosters For Sex With Boys

Greek men would take young boys as lovers. The older man would always take the initiative. Usually, he’d present himself before a young, prepubescent boy and offer him a live rooster—a surefire way to win anyone’s affections that still works today.

The elder partner would act like a father to his new lover boy, teaching him the ways of the world. In a way, that might almost seem like a justification—but it’s not like these men were sleeping with young boys out of a sense of civic duty. The men wouldn’t pick the boys who most needed instruction. They’d pick the best-looking ones they could find.

The boy would be the older man’s constant companion—until the boy started to grow facial hair. Once a boy could grow hair on his face, the older man viewed the boy as getting on in years and booted him out.

When he grew a beard, the boy became a man. Now it was his turn to pick a boy of his own and keep the whole twisted tradition going.

7 Athletes Sold Their Sweat

Before competing, Greek athletes would take off all their clothes and cover themselves in oil. That was how they performed. Whether they were running or grappling with another man, Greek athletes would do it naked.

By the end, they would usually be covered in filth. So afterward, the athletes scraped all that sweat, filth, and dead skin off their bodies. It would be gross to watch—but a lot worse if your job was to help out.

A group of slaves working as gloios-collectors would have to do just that. They would run around collecting all the scrapings and bottling up all the weird, disgusting things that fell off the athletes’ bodies.

These scrapings would then be sold as medicine. People would rub the sweat of athletes on their skin. They believed that it calmed aches and pains—which it probably didn’t do particularly well.

If nothing else, though, the Greek people, after rubbing sweat and dirt on their skin, got to smell like an Olympian.

6 Women’s Illnesses Were Treated In The Filthiest Ways Possible

The Greeks believed that women had a unique susceptibility to the impure. Disgusting things, they believed, affected women in a way that they did not affect men.

That didn’t just mean that women were more easily grossed out—this was an idea that became part of their medicine. When a woman had a disease, the Greeks believed that there was no better treatment than disgusting filth.

A woman suffering from a discharge, for example, would drink a mix of “roast mule excrement” and wine. If she had a miscarriage, they’d put cow dung on her. This occurred because of another weird belief: that a woman’s womb could move around the body. They believed that the womb would be so disgusted by the smell of the dung that it would run away.

5 Sneezing Was Promoted As An Effective Birth Control Method

The Greek physician Soranus taught that birth control was a woman’s responsibility. If a woman got pregnant, he felt, it was her own fault. After all, it was a little unreasonable to expect men to do anything to stop that from happening.

In reality, if a Greek woman got pregnant, it probably was a man’s fault—specifically, Soranus’s. He told women that they could just sneeze instead of using contraceptives. After making love, Soranus told women that they just needed to squat, sneeze, and rinse and they wouldn’t get pregnant.

Obviously, it didn’t work. Soranus had a few backup ideas, though. He also suggested rubbing honey or cedar resin on your genitals before making love—which, if nothing else, probably discouraged people from having sex in the first place.

4 Slaves Had To Wear Chastity Belts

The Greeks didn’t want their slaves to waste their time making love under the stars. If you were a slave in ancient Greece, there was a decent chance your owner would make you wear a chastity belt just to make sure.

Greek slaves would often have to endure something called infibulation. That meant that a metal ring would be wrapped around their genitals. It would seal them shut tightly enough that even getting excited would be painful, and it could only be taken off with a key.

If your master made you wear a chastity belt, you knew it could have been a lot worse. This was really just an alternative to becoming a eunuch.

3 They Thought Lesbians Had Giant Clitorises

When it came to women’s rights, ancient Greece wasn’t exactly the most progressive country. They didn’t really believe in listening to what women had to say—and so the ancient Greeks had some pretty weird ideas.

Above all, the Greeks really didn’t understand lesbians. They couldn’t conceive of any two people making love without somebody penetrating somebody else. They refused to believe that women were doing anything else.

And so, they concluded that lesbians must all be born with gigantic clitorises. They referred to it as the “female penis” and figured that it was the cause of female homosexuality.

That idea held on for a lot longer than it should have. No more than 100 years ago, even Sigmund Freud believed that the clitoris was behind this whole lesbian phenomenon.

2 They Used Crocodile Dung As Skin Cream

Crocodiles were a bigger part of life for the Greeks than they are for us, and that led to some weird details in Greek medicine. One medical treatise, for example, offers a warning for victims of crocodile bites.

If the crocodile walks back into the patient’s home after biting him and—because ancient Greek crocodiles were jerks—pees on the wound, the patient will die. Apparently, this happened often enough that they had to write about it.

Crocodiles weren’t just a threat, though. They were a cure, too. The Greeks recommended treating scars around the eyes by applying a little crocodile dung as eye shadow. “Levigate the dung of the land crocodile with water,” a Greek medical document recommends, “and anoint.”

1 They Held Phallic Parades

Once a year, the roads of Athens would be alive with penises. Men and women would march down the streets, holding gigantic phalli proudly above their heads as a tribute to their god.

This was an integral part of a Dionysian celebration—a festival held in honor of the god of wine. Dionysus’s followers would get drunk out of their minds and lead a phallic procession to the temple, singing songs about penises and yelling rude jokes at people as they went.

According to Aristotle, phallic processions were the birthplace of comedic theater. He claimed that people adapted the jokes they’d yell during the parades into full stage plays. If Aristotle’s right, all comedy began with Greeks carrying gigantic cartoon dicks.

Ancient Rome holds a mythic place in our imaginations. It’s the land of historical epics like Ben-Hur and Gladiator, where men in golden armor ride chariots and emperors are fed grapes in reclining chairs.

Real life in Rome, though, was quite a bit less glamorous. In a time before modern sanitation and medicine, getting through an average day was a difficult task—and far more disgusting than you could ever imagine.

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The cockroach is one annoying and troublesome insect that we humans still aren’t used to—and probably never will be. This is even though roaches have adapted to hanging around us since forever and seem to be enjoying the relationship.

There are lots of interesting and disgusting facts about roaches that many of us do not know. For example, they are superbugs that can survive for weeks with vital body parts missing, they love our ears, and they can bite us when we stop leaving food for them.

10 They Can Live Without Their Heads For Weeks

Cockroaches are tough survivors, and getting rid of them is ridiculously difficult. Cutting off a roach’s head does not even count as a death sentence because the pest can survive for weeks without it. The roach only dies later because it doesn’t have a mouth with which to eat or drink.

Cockroaches can live without their heads because they do not use their heads the same way we do. We humans die soon after decapitation because our bodies lose lots of blood and blood pressure. Cockroaches do not have much blood or blood pressure to begin with. So their necks just clot, and they continue roaming around as if nothing happened.

Even if we humans managed to find a way around the massive loss of blood and blood pressure, we would still be finished because the nerves in our bodies need to be connected to our brains to survive. We also need our noses and mouths to breathe.

The bodies of roaches work independently of their tiny brains. They also breathe through small holes on their bodies. All these features allow cockroaches to live for weeks without their heads. They only succumb to hunger and thirst because they have not figured out a way to eat and drink with their skin.^[1]

Interestingly, the head of a cockroach remains alive for hours after decapitation as evidenced by its moving antennae. In fact, the head can remain alive for longer if it is refrigerated and given enough nutrients.

9 They Hate Humans Touching Them

According to one common cockroach fact that has been appearing on the Internet, these creatures hate it when humans touch them—so much that they often flee to start cleaning themselves of that disgusting human contact. But it’s not what you think. Cockroaches hate humans or anything else touching them because that simple contact can be dangerous for their existence.

To be clear, cockroaches hate being around humans as much as humans hate being around these disgusting insects. Cockroaches naturally flee from larger creatures—human or not—because they know that any contact with the larger creature will often lead to death.

In fact, contact with almost any organism could leave some residue on the roach that could be detrimental to its survival. In the case of humans, it is the natural oils that we unwittingly leave on anything we touch. That oil could also disrupt how the cockroach’s body works.

Most affected are the antennae. They may seem unremarkable to us, but they are crucial for a cockroach’s survival. They work as the creature’s nose and are required for smelling food and finding potential mates. Those oils will reduce the pest’s ability to smell, which is bad for the roach.^[2]

8 They Are Attracted To Our Ears

You might have read about cockroaches getting stuck in people’s ears or even crawling past their ears to reach their skulls. In severe instances, the rogue roach could lay eggs inside the host’s head or could even die there.

It turns out that those stories do not pop up as often as they should. Cockroaches should end up in our ears more often than they already do.

As previously mentioned, cockroaches will often avoid humans. However, they love moving around in the dark, which is also when humans sleep. And it seems like they are not particularly concerned about paying regular visits to the sides of a sleeping human.

The wax in our ears secretes volatile fatty acids—a kind of chemical that is also given off by foods like bread and cheese. Volatile fatty acids attract roaches to their source. If that is our ear, the roach quickly realizes that the human ear is tight, stuffy, and warm, which is how they love their homes.

And what sort of creature rejects a free home with free food?

Unfortunately, this quickly becomes a problem for the cockroach and the sleeping human. Movements in the tight ear could cause the sleeping human to subconsciously scratch his ear. This pushes the roach deeper into the ear or even kills it if enough pressure is applied. Either situation is bad for the ear and its owner.

A living roach may end up deep inside the ear or even inside the skull. The spines on the roach’s legs could damage the inner ear, causing an infection or even hearing loss if the eardrum is affected.^[3]

A dead roach is also a problem, and a squashed roach is an even bigger worry. The insides of cockroaches contain deadly bacteria that could cause some nasty health problems.

7 They Can Bite Humans

Cockroaches are omnivores because they eat both plants and animals. They actually eat anything, even if it is a living human. Yes! Roaches can bite humans. (A quick confession: I have been bitten once. The sting-like bite was so painful that it woke me from sleep.)

To be clear, cockroaches do not always seek humans to bite. They usually prefer other sources of food. They will not bite when attacked by a human, either. Instead, they usually try to run.

However, they may start to bite humans and even pets when there are so many other roaches around that there is not enough food for everyone. But even in this situation, they will still try to avoid chomping on humans. Most bites happen when the roach finds small food particles hanging off the body of a sleeping human.

These grubs are usually found around the fingers, hands, and legs—the areas where most bites happen. The bites can be painful and have been compared to getting zapped by a giant roach-sized mosquito. Treatment is usually advised after a bite because the roach could introduce bacteria into the body.^[4]

6 They Used To Like Sugar But Now Hate It

Cockroaches love sugar. They will give you a thumbs up if you leave candy, cakes, fruits, and juice with high sugar content lying uncovered around your home. Leave raw sugar lying around, and they will love you forever.

Pest control businesses discovered this in the 1980s. They observed that sprinkling sugar in a location would leave roaches milling around in no time. The businesses used that to their advantage and started to bait roaches with glucose laced with insecticide. The meal killed the roaches when they returned to their homes.

Other roaches often ate the remains of the dead, which is not surprising because these creatures will eat almost anything. The scavenging roaches also died as the bodies of the dead roaches still contained the poison. This went on for some time until cockroaches learned that sugar was killing them.^[5]

Cockroaches later began to resist this sugar. Their senses quickly adjusted to detect sweet sugar as bitter. Many pest control businesses discovered that, too, and replaced the glucose with fructose, a different sugar. The roaches quickly caught on and started avoiding fructose as well.

Scientists traced this surprising switch to millions of years ago when roaches first developed the ability to detect sweet but poisonous parts of certain plants they ate as bitter. That skill was genetically suppressed when they started to live around humans and only returned when humans started to poison their food.

5 Termites Are Cockroaches

Termites and cockroaches belong to the same order, Blattodea. So termites are technically cockroaches. Interestingly, termites were not considered cockroaches until 2018. Before then, termites belonged to the order Isoptera.

Studies into the similarities between both creatures began in 1934 when researchers observed that their guts contained similar microbes. A research paper published in 2007 finally confirmed that they were relatives and recommended that the taxonomic rank be adjusted to put them under the same family.

Actually, the paper suggested that the orders Blattodea (for cockroaches) and Isoptera (for termites) should be considered subfamilies under a new family called Termitidae.

Several scientists with the Entomological Society of America (ESA) refused this suggestion at the time because they did not want termites to be considered cockroaches. Besides, another Termitidae family already existed in the taxonomic rank and could cause confusion with the new suggested Termitidae family.

The ESA later backtracked and agreed to categorize termites as cockroaches after putting it to a vote in 2018. ESA reclassified the termite order Isoptera as a suborder and placed it under the cockroach Blattodea order instead of creating a new family as the 2007 paper suggested.

That does not mean you should call termites “cockroaches,” though. Termites should be called “termites” and cockroaches, “cockroaches.” Remember that saying about knowing a tomato is a fruit but not putting it in a fruit salad? A similar idea applies here, too. “Knowledge is knowing that a termite is a cockroach. Wisdom is not calling it a cockroach.”^[6]

4 They Can Change Gears When Running

Anyone who has ever tried to kill a roach has realized that they are very fast for their size. Well, it seems like we should not be surprised because some cockroaches can change their speeds.

Scientists have likened this to how horses go from trotting to galloping or how cars change gears to increase their speeds. Cockroaches do not change gears like motorcars because their scientists have not invented roachmobiles yet. Instead, they shift gears by changing the position of their legs as they run.

To be clear, scientists had only observed this in the 2017 study in the Nauphoeta cinerea cockroach. Like most other roaches, it flees when it detects a bigger creature around. The roach runs with its middle leg on one side of the body and the front and hind legs on the other side of the body touching the ground at the same moment. This is called the alternating tripodal gait.

However, the alternating tripodal gait is not fast enough, uses lots of energy, and makes the fleeing roach unbalanced. So the roach starts to use the metachronal gait pattern, which does not have these problems. This time, all legs on one side are lifted off the ground—from the front legs to the middle and the hind legs. They touch the ground in that same order.^[7]

3 Their Brains Could Be Used To Make Lifesaving Drugs

Here is a disgusting fact that could change medicine forever. Scientists are working on creating drugs that could cure E. coli and MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)—two deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria—using chemicals extracted from the brains of cockroaches.

Researchers discovered that tissues from the brains of cockroaches killed these bacteria when they started to investigate how some locusts thrived in filthy environments in the Middle East. Cockroaches got involved when researchers decided to find out how these creatures survived in sewage and drainage areas without dying of the terrible bacteria that thrive there.

The researchers discovered that the nerves of locusts and the brains of cockroaches and locusts contained chemicals that killed these dangerous bacteria. Researchers have not confirmed the exact chemicals that do the work. They are still trying to uncover the answer and hope to use it to develop antibacterial drugs in the future.^[8]

2 They Can Make Group Decisions

Cockroaches are smarter than we think. They can even make decisions in groups, just like many other insects and animals.

Several years back, Dr. Jose Halloy of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, conducted a study to observe how roaches think. He put several of them inside a dish with three homes and waited to see how they would divide themselves.

Dr. Halloy observed that the roaches first came together, touching each other with their antennae. After some time, they divided themselves into the homes equally. For example, 50 roaches split into two groups of 25 each when they were given three homes with a capacity for 40 roaches each.

One group lived in the first home, and the other group lived in the second. The third home was abandoned. All 50 roaches also opted to live in a single home when they were given three homes that could accommodate over 50 roaches each.^[9]

1 The Ecosystem Would Be Destroyed If They Go Extinct

Cockroaches might be hated, but they are crucial for a balanced ecosystem. Our ecosystem would suffer a serious disruption if they ever go extinct.

First, the extinction of roaches would have a direct effect on the populations of the many species of birds, rats, and mice that consider cockroaches as a source of food. These other animals would not die off completely because they usually feed on other organisms and sometimes plants, too. But their numbers would plummet.

In turn, the diminished populations of these animals would reduce the number of cats, wolves, coyotes, eagles, reptiles, and several other creatures that consider birds, rats, and mice as food. And it goes on like that. The hardest hit would be some species of wasps that depend on cockroaches to maintain their life cycles. These wasps would go extinct because cockroaches did.

The forests would also suffer if cockroaches go extinct because these pests feed on decaying matter, which often contains lots of nitrogen. The cockroaches eat this nitrogen with the decaying matter and then excrete it. Their nitrogen-rich poop is later absorbed by the soil, which uses it to support the growth of plants.^[10]

A lack of roaches will deprive the dirt of nitrogen. This means that the soil will be unable to support the growth of enough plants, which will affect the populations of creatures that feed on these plants and the predators of those creatures. This continues until it reaches the top of the food chain. So, folks, we just have to tolerate roaches.

Are you sitting down? We’ve got some bad news for you. We’ve done a little digging, and it turns out that you’re pretty disgusting. As in utterly, freakishly gross. Not to mention creepy. In fact, you’re probably one of the most all-round awful creatures on the entire planet.

But not to worry, you’re not alone. Our research has shown that everyone reading this, the editors who commissioned it, and especially the guy writing it are super-gross, creep-tastic weirdos. You may be disgusting, but trust us: Everyone else is just as bad.

10 You Keep On Farting On Planes

Your body is a farting machine. Seriously, it’s like you just can’t stop tooting. Studies have shown that most of us expel gas at least 10 times in every 24 hours, adding up to 1 liter (35 oz) of the smelly stuff every day. But there’s one place where you’re guaranteed to break even this odor-rific record. The moment you step on a plane, it’s like your body goes into gas-producing overdrive.

If you’re a frequent flier, you’re probably aware of this already. As a plane climbs ever higher, the air pressure changes. That’s why your plastic water bottle swells up and then crumples slightly as you come in for landing. Same deal with your belly. The gas in your abdomen expands, leading to a severely bloated feeling. A feeling that most of us deal with by sneakily letting one rip and hoping that other passengers don’t notice.

Excessive farting while flying has gotten so bad that airlines now use super smell-absorbent charcoal filters in the air conditioning and are considering placing charcoal in the seats themselves. Back in the 1960s, it was even suggested that all these farts could result in an aircraft accidentally igniting and exploding in the sky. Bear that in mind next time you order the five-bean chili before hopping a plane across the continent.

9 You’re Almost Certainly A Nose Picker

Farting every time you get on a plane is pretty gross, but it’s not exactly your fault. And it’d be pretty unfair of us to call you disgusting for something beyond your control, right? In that case, let’s turn our attention to something that you could easily quit but are just too darn lazy to do. According to science, you’re almost certainly a nose picker.

This isn’t something to be proud of. Yanking great big boogers out of your face is the perfect way to spread germs and doesn’t exactly look pleasant, either. Yet most of us are kidding ourselves if we think that we’re above such behavior.

In 1995, two US researchers decided to study nose picking in Wisconsin. Out of 1,000 adult participants, they found that an insane 91 percent of them picked their nostrils at least a few times a day. Two were even such dedicated pickers that they felt the habit was ruining their lives.

In case you’re wondering if this can be applied elsewhere, other studies have yielded similar results. One that targeted 200 teenagers from five schools in Bangalore found that essentially 100 percent of them were pickers. If you’re reading this right now with a finger up your nostril, you should know you’re not alone.

8 You Want To Have Sex With Yourself

In Greek legend, Narcissus was a handsome dude who famously fell in love with his own reflection, leading to his death. At least, Narcissus’s love was strictly based on his aesthetic qualities. You, on the other hand, want nothing more than to hold yourself down and have wild, crazy, passionate sex with yourself.

Scientists have long known that we tend to be attracted to people who look like us. There’s even a phenomenon in the lesbian community known as “twinning,” which is when a similar-looking couple starts dressing and styling themselves so alike that people mistake them for sisters or twins.

In 1999, a team of scientists decided to see how far this attraction to similar people went. They asked heterosexual males and females to quickly rate the attractiveness of several faces that were flashed at them on a screen. Unknown to the participants, one of the faces was their own, digitally altered to look like a member of the opposite sex. Want to guess what happened next?

Nearly all the participants rated their own gender-swapped face as the most attractive they’d been shown. In other words, most people’s ideal one-night fling would be themselves sporting a peroxide wig or a stick-on mustache.

7 You Keep Sniffing Your Friends’ Sweat

The term “panty sniffer” is a rightfully insulting one, suggesting that the subject is a creepy pervert who can’t control his olfactory urges. While admittedly not quite at that terrible level, most of us are not much better. For example, you spend all your time sniffing your friends and colleagues for traces of sweat.

Don’t panic. We all do it. And this one is completely unconscious. See, our sweat carries a whole host of chemicals that change combination depending on what’s causing us to sweat. We may be perspiring because we’re scared, stressed, in pain, or just had incredible sex with our gender-swapped double.

The point is, our sweat changes its composition and odor due to what we’re feeling. And scientists are convinced that these different smells are a vital part of nonverbal human communication.

Plenty of studies have found that we can subconsciously tell what caused someone to sweat. Our own bodies then emotionally respond to this stimulus. So when we smell fear sweat, we become more alert to danger. When we smell sweat caused by someone feeling disgust, our faces mimic that disgust. It’s now thought that sweat is simply one of the many nonverbal cues that we humans use to communicate—meaning we’re effectively sniffing each other all the time.

6 You Happily Drink Cupfuls Of Snot

Bodily fluids are nearly all disgusting. That’s why movies like Ghostbusters and Evil Dead feature protagonists getting covered in snot-like goo, blood, and pus. It’s the most effective way of making audiences go “eww.”

Yet this instinctive revulsion apparently doesn’t apply to our own lives. Even if you squirm in disgust every time you watch Peter Venkman get slimed, you’re doing something far grosser. Every single day, you’re happily drinking the equivalent of about 1 liter (35 oz) of pure snot.

Our bodies are constantly manufacturing mucus. The average respiratory tract is responsible for pumping out over 1 liter (35 oz) of it every single day. And all that nose gunk has to go somewhere. So your body has evolved a bunch of little nasal hairs called cilia. Their job is to constantly shift the mucus up your nasal passages and then down the back of your throat. From there, you swallow it.

5 You Have Some Weird Sexual Fantasies

Even if we consider ourselves the best writers of Brony erotica on the Internet, most of us don’t like to talk openly about our sexual fantasies. If we ever do, we tend to keep it strictly vanilla. (“I like blondes with big boobs,” “I like billionaires that look like Jamie Dornan.”) Yet science says that your fantasies are less vanilla than you want us to believe. In fact, it says that your tastes are downright weird.

In 2014, researchers in Canada surveyed over 1,500 adults to find out what their fantasy lives involved. From there, the researchers broke down the fantasies into common themes and assigned them a number for how statistically likely they were to show up among either men or women. The results make for some interesting reading.

For example, over 80 percent of both genders daydream about having sex in “an unusual place.” Over half of women and over two-thirds of men fantasize about having sex in front of members of the public while over half of both genders dream of being dominated. Nearly two-thirds of all men got off on the idea of watching a stranger undress without them knowing. Over half of all women felt turned on by the idea of having sex with more than three people at once.

We’re still not on the weirdest stuff yet. About 45 percent of men imagined having sex with two men, even though only 3.6 percent of study respondents identified as homosexual. Nearly one-quarter were attracted to the idea of flashing their genitals in a public place.

Meanwhile, around one-third of women liked the idea of being forced to have sex, and 41 percent were into tying someone up to gain sexual pleasure. In short, science says that you’ve probably got some incredibly strange stuff going on in your head. But then again, so does everyone else you know.

4 You Probably Hate Your Friends

Friends are meant to be the plus points of our existence, the high-score bonus we get as a reward for putting up with family. There’s even scientific evidence that friends are awesome: Studies have shown that having strong social ties can be even better for your health than quitting smoking.

However, most of us aren’t content to merely have good friends. We want to have bad friends as well. The likelihood is that most of you reading this have friends whom you basically love to hate.

Known as “frenemies,” the friend-nemesis is a growing phenomenon that’s getting new scientific attention. In most cases, these are people who stress us out—the guy who calls every single story we tell boring, the girl who looks down her nose at our every accomplishment. Yet we’re stuck with them due to loyalty or the fact that they’re good friends with the rest of our group. Although we’d probably call them “friends,” the reality is that they’re slowly killing us.

Spending time with frenemies has been linked to high blood pressure, insane stress levels, and even an increased risk of cancer. It may seem a bit weird, but trust us: You’re probably right to hate these particular “friends.”

3 You’re Probably A Nail-Biter

Like nose picking, nail-biting is one of those vaguely disgusting habits that nobody likes to admit to. Although your habit probably won’t spread a horrific disease and kill everyone and everything that you’ve ever loved, it’s still unpleasant. Yet just like nose picking, most of us have done it at one point or another in our lives. According to science, there’s a nearly 50-50 chance that you were a nail-biter during your teenage years.

In general, kids and teenagers are more prone to compulsive behaviors than adults. And nail-biting might be one of the most compulsive of them all. A Canadian study from the 1990s put the number of kids who bite at 33 percent and the number of teenagers at 45 percent.

It’s speculated that there might even be a hereditary element. If you see an older family member biting, you’re more likely to bite, too. Other suggestions are that it’s a transference behavior that starts when kids realize that they’re too old to be sucking their thumbs but don’t want to give up the comfort of having something to stick in their mouths.

2 You Finish Too Fast In Bed

What’s the ideal amount of time to have sex for? While the obvious answer might be “all the time,” the reality is that most of us have jobs and flabby bodies that get tired easily. So how long do you reckon that you can go for? Forty-five minutes? An hour?

We hate to break it to you, but you’re probably aiming a little high there, champ. The average person manages to keep the magic going in the sack for only a paltry 15 minutes.

This is true for both heterosexual couples and gay male couples—with the upper limit being around 30 minutes. Of approximately 800 individuals studied by researchers, barely any broke the hour-long barrier and most managed to flop around for only one-quarter of that time.

Impressively, this is actually longer than other studies have claimed. For men, the average amount of time between penetration and orgasm is often said to be as little as two minutes. No wonder your girlfriend always looks unhappy.

There is one exception to this rule. The first study found that lesbian couples on average last between 30 and 45 minutes, with a large number breaking the magic one-hour barrier.

1 You Might Be Under Control Of An Evil Parasite

How would it feel if you suddenly discovered that your life was not your own? That something else was affecting your daily decisions, altering your moods, and generally running your existence for its own benefit? Pretty freaky, huh? Well, prepare yourself for some bad news. There’s a scarily good chance that this is exactly what’s happening to you.

We’ve known for years that there are certain parasites that can control animals. The hairworm, for example, infects grasshoppers and forces them to commit suicide by jumping into water—where the hairworm reproduces.

It’s only recently, though, that we’ve begun to realize that such organisms could affect humans, too. The leading candidate is Toxoplasma gondii. Found in soil, spoiled meat, and cat feces, this single-celled brain parasite is thought to have infected up to one-third of all humans. And studies are suggesting that it changes their personalities.

In 2006, one study suggested that Toxoplasma gondii could screw up your mind in a way that we normally associate with brain injury. Guilt, intelligence, and even affection—potentially significant areas in determining your personality—were all found to be changed by the creature.

It’s even thought that Toxoplasma gondii could have inadvertently helped to shape human culture over the centuries. If that’s true, then it’s entirely possible that we owe the modern world less to human ingenuity and more to the nightmare worm monsters living in our skulls.

Who of us didn’t grow up being told ‘Don’t chew your nails’ or ‘Stop picking your nose’? Though children may not realize it, the fact is, the human body is fairly nasty and it’s normally a good idea to try to mask our grotesque bodily habits for the good of our social image. Most of us usually grow up and out of our grosser habits by the time we’re adults or at least only indulge in secret. Usually.

But there’s a weird fascination over the disgusting and for some few there’s also fame and fortune to be found behind the stigma. These are ten examples of ways an income has been found from gross habits.

Top 10 Most Bizarre Modern Jobs

10 Pooping for Profit and Purpose

There’s a particularly nasty bacteria called C. Difficile that infects nearly half a million people in the United States alone. The symptoms include watery diarrhea and cramping, which can even reach fatal severity. To counteract this dangerous infection, a course of antibiotics is usually prescribed, but antibiotics do not discriminate between harmful and helpful bacteria. During the course of treatment some 2,000 different kinds of stomach bacteria, most very helpful, are also killed. Worse yet, C. Difficile can be difficult to permanently destroy and the tenacious invader will sometimes repopulate even after a course of antibiotics,^[1] but there is a solution.

Fecal matter transplants. These transplants are the result of taking the rich gut biome from a healthy human stool sample and distilling it into a pill to be taken by someone suffering from C. Difficile. This replenishes the population of helpful bacteria as well as assisting in the elimination of C. Difficile from the body, but not just any poop can be used for a fecal matter transplant. Out of a thousand prospective donors only 4 perfect of them qualify after rigorous medical testing. Extremely healthy poop is a rare commodity, one worth paying for. Donors can make $250 for five samples a week or $13,000 a year as compensation.^[2]

But it isn’t just about the money.

“We get most of our donors to come in three or four times a week, which is pretty awesome,” said Mark Smith, co-founder of a fecal matter transplant company, “You’re usually helping three or four patients out with each sample, and we keep track of that and let you know.”

9 Fast Food and Weight Gain For Science

In 2012 researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis made an unusual offer: gain weight and get paid. Their research into weight related diabetes and hypertension hinged on being able to observe the weight gain in progress. Participants who answered the call to action were asked to consume an extra 1,000 calories of fast food every day in order to put on the pounds. Since the goal was to understand why some people develop these adverse health conditions it meant that the participants who gained this weight would likely be putting themselves in increased danger of worsening their health. This meant hazard pay.

For meeting the goal of increasing their weight by 5 to 6 percent over the course of 3 months the participants were given up to $3,500. Though it may sound like an easy task, the men and women who joined this project didn’t find it enjoyable for long.

Dr. Samuel Klein, the lead researcher on the project said, “This is not pleasant for them, It’s not easy to stuff your face every day for a long period of time.”

And one of his participants agreed, she said after two weeks, “I could hardly breathe anymore.”^[3]

8 Artsy-Fartsy Fame and Fortune

In the late 19th century a boy named Joseph Pujol discovered he had an odd talent while swimming on a trip with his family. During his swim he had an strange cold sensation inside his gut. Panicked, he went ashore to a private place and watched as liters of water evacuated from his rump. His doctor was unworried and so Pujol didn’t think of it again until years later when encouraged by his friends to repeat the feat. It was then he discovered that this wasn’t a one off event. He had the unusual ability to inhale liquid or air into his rear end and release it on command. From that moment on he began to nurture his newfound talent.

Eventually he put his skills on display as a performer, under the name Le Petomane and began putting on shows. He dazzled his audience with an array of different farts, each one described for the benefit of his fans. A small quiet fart he would liken to a bride on her wedding night and then a messy loud slop of a fart was the same woman two weeks later. A prolonged ten second fart was likened to a dressmaker ripping a cloth in two and he even emulated the blast of a canon with a loud burst from his butt.

“People were literally writhing about,” A journalist described the reaction to his performance. “Women, stuffed in their corsets, were being carried out by nurses which the cunning manager had stationed in the hall.”^[4]

Later in his act he used his talent to smoke two cigarettes at once. In the rousing finish to the show he would play famous tunes on an ocarina using a hose that channeled his farts into wind for the instrument. Le Petomane became an amazing success and at one point was the highest paid performer in all of France. He stayed in show business until after World War I when he retired from the stage to continue life as a baker. He died at the ripe old age of 88.

After his death a medical school in Paris asked to examine his remains to help better understand how his anus performed the miracles it did. His family declined by saying, “there are some things in this life which simply must be treated with reverence.”^[5]

7 Overeating To Success

Everyone loves food, but sometimes we’ll enjoy it a little too much. When our eyes are bigger than our stomach our over consumption can cause an upset stomach, spikes in blood pressure, and lethargy,^[6] not to mention regretting whatever decisions took us to that moment.

But some people take that feeling and conquer it. One such man is Joey Chestnut, who is one of the most successful competitive eaters in the world. He has held records and won competitions the world over, including the feats of eating 32 double patty hamburgers in 38 minutes, eating 74 hotdogs in 10 minutes, and 413 chicken wings in 12 hours.^[7]

His skills at overeating aren’t for nothing. In 2010 Mr. Chestnut earned $218,500 for his eating prowess.^[8] Though he admits that it isn’t always easy. After setting a new world record for hotdog eating in 2018 he said about his body afterward, “It’s not pretty, bro. There have been some double-flushers.”^[9]

6 Burping For Cash

Belching is a sport. The current record for length of a burp stands at 1 minute, 13 seconds, and 57 millisecond. This colossally long belch has gone unchallenged since 2009.^[10] A glorious sport it is, but not really one that pays. To make any money in this competitive field requires being in the right place at the right time. For some fortunate few woman the right place was St. Louis and the right time was in 2014. The call went out for actors to star in a soda company’s new commercial and the skill they needed above all else: burping.^[11]

An ad went up on Craiglist offering to pay $750 for each actor as well as drinks and snacks provided on the day of filming to help coax out the necessary belches.

“Burps of any size are welcome, from small, quiet burps to monstrously loud belches,” The ad read. Thankfully no previous acting experience was required.^[12]

10 Truly Disgusting Facts About Ancient Roman Life

5 Professionally Popping Pimples

The standard recommendation for pimples is to resist the urge to pop them ourselves, but rather to find an over the counter solution and failing that, to visit a doctor for help. They are after all trained and can perform any required popping in a sterile environment.^[13] Most of us ignore this advice. Despite the risks of scarring or infection, popping our zits is a satisfying, if disgusting experience. Unlike most items on this list though, being employed to perform this task isn’t a limited opportunity career. There are tens of thousands of people being paid to do this disgusting deed. They are skin specialist doctors called dermatologists.^[14]

Not only is this a lucrative career path on its own, paying on average $345,000 a year in the United States,^[15] some doctors take it a step further. Doctor Sandra Lee (aka: Dr. Pimple Popper) hosts a Youtube channel where she displays particularly difficult or fascinating dermatological cases. The channel has more than 6 million subscribers.^[16]

When describing why anyone would want to watch something so gross as the usual fare on her channel she said, “It’s part fascination, part can’t look away, not unlike watching a car accident. There’s also something satisfying in the resolution, like something is being removed that shouldn’t be there and now the skin has been cleansed of an impurity.”^[17]

4 Money in Exchange For Spit

When researchers are trying to make genetic discoveries, the classic approach would be to find people with the disease then look for differences between their DNA and the DNA of someone without the disease. This can be an intensive process to find, communicate with, and finally sample the subject’s DNA for the research. In other cases, some companies rely on huge collections of DNA, with associated data on the donors, to accurately trace the ancestry of a customer, but it can be difficult to maintain a library of DNA from all types of people the world over. People don’t usually line themselves up to give away DNA samples for free.

The answer to these troubles is used by such companies as Genos and DNASimple. These companies will pay you for your spit, or more precisely, the DNA contained within your spit and information about yourself. This data can be used to help match researchers with the right DNA donors easier. DNASimple pays a flat rate of $50 per sample and Genos offers to sequence your genome for around $500 and will then pay you $50—$200 if you’re DNA can be used for a scientific study. While not a livelihood, there is more and more money to be made from people’s spit. DNASimple secured a $200,000 start up loan from an investor in recent years and the industry is growing.^[18]

While some are frustrated with the idea of being paid to participate in research, Sharon Terry, CEO of the Genetic Alliance described the situation by saying, “Some people might think it’s bad to put any kind of commerce in health at all, but it’s already in there. We just don’t have any part of it, we patients. Everyone else makes a lot of money.”^[19]

Perhaps the time has come to finally sell a valuable commodity we didn’t know we had—our spit.

3 Bathroom Scouters Paid To Pee

We all need to use the bathroom, usually a few times a day, but sometimes desperately. When we’re in a new city or an unfamiliar part of town and the urge strikes, where do we go? Where’s the nearest bathroom? Will it be clean? Is there a bidet or toilet paper? Do they charge? There’s no time to answer these questions when we’re holding back the floodgates! And with no guidance there’s no telling what unholy gas station horror or side of the road bush we may be forced to use.

It turns out, knowing the location and quality of nearby bathrooms is a service worth paying for and there are apps that will indeed pay for that kind of information. One app called Toiletfinder paid $20 for some restroom reviews and $100/week for regular copy writers. Writers contribute anonymously so that their subject matter can’t be used against them by friends and family (what’s wrong with writing about pee?). Reviews are accompanied by a star rating from the reviewer and GPS location to help future bathroom goers to find the right place at the right time.^[20] Apps like this and other have hundreds of thousands of bathrooms logged and reviewed the world over.^[21]

2 Regurgitating A Living

No one. No one likes to vomit. The acid, the half digested food, the smell—Nothing about the experience is enjoyable and this disgusting bodily function is something most of us would do all in our power to avoid. What goes in should not come back out the same way, but for one man, regurgitating what he had swallowed was a novelty he discovered as a child when he needed to hide coins from other children. It turns out, no one looks for your money in your stomach. He soon found that he could easily bring back up just about anything.

This was a skill he put to good use in show business. Mr. Stevie Starr has used his ability to put on acts on television shows like America’s Got Talent and late night programs with Jay Leno and David Letterman as well as live tours. Among the objects he swallows are light bulbs, coins, thumbtacks, and billiard balls,^[22] but a performance of just swallowing and unswallowing would quickly grow redundant. Taking it to higher levels, he also swallows a cup of sugar, followed by a cup of water, then he’ll regurgitate the sugar—dry as a bone. He’ll also swallow ten numbered coins then ask the audience to choose the order they return, sometimes two at a time. What he swallows and regurgitates isn’t limited to the inanimate. In some performances he’ll consume two live fish at the start of the show and bring them back out, perfectly healthy, at the end.^[23]

Vomiting up the contents of our stomach is usually the worst way to spend an evening, but watching someone else do it is well worth the money Mr. Starr earns.

1 Professional Finger Licker Wanted

In polite company, licking our fingers after a meal is usually frowned upon, but for a company that has advertised “finger licking good chicken” for years the habit was a badge of honor. The restaurant chain Kentucky Friend Chicken has recently started a campaign to find the most highly qualified finger licker in the world to be the new face for their upcoming ad series. Their announcement on twitter asked, “Have you ever caught yourself licking your fingers and thought to yourself ‘I’d look decent doing that on a billboard?’”

This ongoing search is asking perspective professional finger lickers to submit a twitter with the hashtag #KFCFRYERME with an 280 character or less explanation of why their finger licking skills are worthy of the cause.^[24] Unlike so many items of this list, this one could still be about you.

In a follow up tweet to the announcement KFC added, “For the love of God; please keep it PG.”^[25]

Top 10 Disgusting Foods The Chinese Eat

How far are you willing to go to get the hot new look? Much of human history has been driven by the desire to present ourselves in our best light. As it turns out, there’s not much that people won’t do in their struggle to be attractive. Here are ten of the grossest things people have tried in the name of beauty.

10 Eel Exfoliation Bath

Some very expensive bubble baths leave you feeling slimy after you get out of the tub. Their manufacturers prefer to say “moisturized”—but for one treatment, “slimy” is definitely the word. To get that perfect glow in their skin, some people in China are taking baths filled with tiny eels.

Each eel is about the size of a pencil. They wriggle over the body and nibble at the dead skin covering it. This leaves the youthful-looking living skin underneath shining through. Unfortunately, the eels haven’t learned to differentiate between the skin on the outside and the internal membranes.

A gentleman wearing loose underwear in the eel bath felt a sharp pain and found that an eel had found its way into his penis. It took a three-hour surgery to remove the errant fish and prompted other countries to watch out for those looking to import the eels.

9 Radiation Therapy

Whenever a scientific discovery is made, there’s always a scramble to find a marketable use for it. Sometimes, this benefits mankind; sometimes, it leads people to smear their faces with radioactive elements.

The eerie glow of radiation made newly documented elements like radium and polonium seemed like ideal boosters for that healthy glow everyone wants. The mysterious radiation rays were quickly touted as cure for medical ailments and were also used in cosmetics. Radiation was added to face creams, soap, rouge, and powders. For those wanting extra sparkly teeth, there was radioactive toothpaste.

Of course, the downside to these radioactive products was that instead of health, they caused untold numbers of cancers. Sores and hair loss are common side effects of radiation poisoning, as well. Those who worked with radium developed bone necrosis and incurable cancers. This soon put an end to the fad for radioactive products.

8 Lead, Arsenic, And Mercury

While today’s must-have is a tan, which suggests we have the leisure to be continually on the beach, in the past, the reverse was the case. To have a tan showed that you spent your days toiling outside. To cultivate a pale face, you needed the money to stay indoors. Or you could take the shortcut of covering your face in white lead, as people have throughout history. The problems with this were not unknown even then. The lead would rot the skin, requiring ever more to be used to cover up the effects of the treatment. The skin would break open as it thinned. Lead also causes aggressiveness, headaches, vomiting, seizures, and eventually death—then you have the perfect pale flesh.

Those wanting to remove spots, freckles, and other skin problems could turn to another dangerous element. “Dr. James P. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers” promised to clear the complexion. Ironically, one of the organs hit hardest by arsenic poisoning is the skin. An overdose of arsenic can lead to hair loss, bloody vomit, diarrhea, and convulsions. But at least you won’t have freckles.

While those products are thankfully things of the past, there is a current vogue for everyone to appear with as light skin as possible. Skin lightening products very often contain mercury, an element which can lead to many horrible side effects, especially kidney problems. You may end up with a fashionably Western face but a deeply unfashionable dialysis machine.

7 Bee Stings

You should always be wary of following celebrity advice. Being pretty and a good actor does not make you a doctor. Gwyneth Paltrow has gone on record about her beauty treatments, and one of them has a sting in the tail.

The actress told an interviewer:

I’ve been stung by bees. It’s a thousands of years old treatment called apitherapy. People use it to get rid of inflammation and scarring. It’s actually pretty incredible if you research it. But, man, it’s painful.

The treatment is painful for Paltrow, but it can be deadly, and not just to the bees. One case of liver failure has been linked to apitherapy.

Those unwilling to be actually stung by bees can simply buy cosmetic products containing the venom. Not that it will do anything except speed the decline in bee populations and your bank balance.

6 Fish Pedicure

Fish aren’t picky eaters. If you dip your toes into a tank of Garra fish, they will quickly dart in and nibble off the dead skin from even the smelliest feet. They are toothless and usually stop at eating the tough outer skin, but there are reports of them taking their feeding frenzy too far and causing bleeding. While the risks of getting an infection from the fish is thought to be very low, there are dangers to dangling your feet in water used by both fish and other clients. Fungal infections could easily spread, and bacteria in the fish tank could cause boils.

Leaving aside the “ick” factor of being eaten by fish that live solely on other peoples’ stinky feet, some legal areas deem the fish to be unsanitary. One Arizona fish spa was shut down, as cosmetic products had to be disinfected and dried before reuse—obviously not an option with fish.

5 Tapeworm Diets

Losing weight should be easy. If you burn more calories than you consume, your weight goes down. But food is so delicious that many find reducing their caloric intake is too hard to do. So they look for ways to increase their calories burned (other than exercising, obviously).

One way of losing weight is to get yourself a friendly tapeworm to take up residence in your intestines. This worm will eat a portion of your food, and it will grow rather than your waistline. While there is evidence that people in the past sold pills which supposedly contained tapeworms, there are recent cases of people actually going through with it. Tapeworm infections cause weight loss and loss of appetite—but also pain, malnutrition, diarrhea, blindness, convulsions, and death.

4 Placenta

The placenta is an organ that develops in pregnant mammals to filter oxygen and nutrients to embryos and remove waste products. Most animals will eat the placenta after birth to regain its nutrients. Some humans do, too. Some aren’t content with leaving it at that, though.

Because of their association with youth and birth, some face creams include placenta in the hopes of it passing some of that goodness on to the user. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that they work. The most common form of placenta used comes from sheep, but those with deep pockets and no gag reflex can also buy creams with human placenta.

While placenta may not do much for the face, the side effects can be alarming. Its use in hair products has caused girls as young as 14 months old to begin to develop sexually due to the level of hormones it contains. Stopping use of the products reversed the effects.

3 Snails

Snail facials are a beauty treatment in which live snails glide across your face. The trail of gel they leave behind is said to fight the signs of aging. Snails have been used for thousands of years to treat inflammation, so there may be something to it. Snail facial specialists say they reduce scars, acne, and stretch marks. There is no scientific confirmation of this, however—so perhaps wait before you plop some snails on your face.

For those who cannot stand the idea of snails rasping at their skin with their radula (a toothed, tongue-like structure) you can buy creams that contain snail gel. The snails exude the gel, which is said to be more effective when they are stressed. There is no information on how the makers of snail gel cream go about stressing out their snails, but it’s unlikely these creams are animal-friendly.

2 Bull Semen

In the crowded marketplace of cosmetics, you need something that separates you from the competition. One way of doing that is to reveal that the magic ingredient in your face mask and hair conditioner is bull semen.

The inventor of the semen hair treatment had been looking for a high-protein recipe and apparently thought the best option would be bull sperm. She comforts her customers by saying, “It really works. The semen is refrigerated before use and doesn’t smell. It leaves your hair looking wonderfully soft and thick.”

If you want the glamorous look without the mental images, Imprivo makes a range of products containing the coyly named BSP (Bull Seminal Plasma).

1 Foreskin Facials

“As smooth as a baby’s buttocks” is a common expression. Some cosmetics companies have taken that cliche and run with it. Taking the foreskins left over after baby boys are circumcised, they have turned human flesh into cash in the bank.

There are face creams which use the cells from foreskins to enrich their products with growth factors, collagen, and other proteins that are claimed to reverse the signs of aging. Because the foreskin contains stem cells, a single one can be grown in the lab to produce enough cells for thousands of treatments. This has not reduced the controversy around using them as an ingredient, especially among those who see circumcision as a form of genital mutilation.

For those who want the direct benefits of stem cells, it is now possible to have cells derived from foreskins injected into your face. The fibroblast cells reinforce the structure of the skin, it is claimed, and users say they detect improvements in their appearance. With each vial of cells costing around $1,000, though, you might hope for more dramatic results.

Animal culling happens for a variety of legitimate reasons. When it is backed by science and carried out in a humane manner, it can protect the welfare of both animals and humans from greater threats. Yet when science is replaced by public hysteria, and humane killing by bizarre plots, the endgame can mean everyone loses.

See Also: 10 Animals That Surprisingly Benefit From Climate Change

10 Grinding Baby Chicks Alive

It only takes one rooster to tend to several hens, but roughly half of chicken eggs that come to term are male. Common sense would say that the males are butchered, but chickens used for meat are a different variety than those used to lay eggs. Males of the egg-laying type are too lean to be sold in supermarkets for meat, so they have no value in the chicken industry.

Like any kind of waste, they are disposed of. Usually in their first few hours of life. They can be suffocated in plastic bags, electrocuted, but more likely they are macerated and ground up while still alive. Grinding male chicks is actually recommended as the humane way to dispose of them, since the grinding is near-instant. Zipping through a high-speed grinder is presumably less painful than being slowly suffocated.

Naturally, animal rights group still take issue with grinding billions of baby animals alive, no matter at what speed. The chicken industry also has a problem with it too, albeit for entirely different reasons—it’s expensive. They would sooner avoid wasting money.

To this end, researchers are finding ways to determine if an embryo is male or female while the egg is still viable for sale. This would save billions of baby chicks from the grinder, and potentially billions of dollars.^[1]

9 Culling Endangered Species

Not all culling is for humans’ benefit. African wildlife conservationists sometimes kill endangered animals as a means of maintaining the stability of an ecosystem. They aren’t concerned with only one species of animal, after all, but the biodiversity of the entire park.

A large predator population means competition for limited resources. Lions, for example, will kill other species of big cats that are even more vulnerable. Even prey may need to be depopulated. Kruger National Park had to cull many of its hippos after a drought left the population with tool little food to survive.

Still, research suggests that culling should be an option of last resort. Historic elephant culls left survivors without older elephants to teach younger generations typical behaviors like recognizing hierarchy and responding to threats. It even gave them the elephant equivalent of shell shock.^[2]

8 Denver Has Enough of Goose Poop

Canadian geese flying overhead is a common sight in some parts of the world, as is the feces they leave behind. A single goose creates about a pound of poop per day. Aside from the nuisance it creates, and the effort required to clean it, their feces contaminates waterways and can cause disease. Eventually, Denver, Colorado’s Parks and Recreation Department had enough of it.

So they culled them. During the geeses’ early-summer molting season, they are flightless, so it’s easy for contracted federal employees to corral and load them into crates. The geese are then slaughtered, butchered, and sent to food pantries where they can be eaten by those in need. Although it’s a tough kind of meat that requires long cooking times, goose meat was once called the “roast beef of the skies.”^[3]

7 Australia Kills the Wrong Sharks

A series of fatal shark bites in Western Australia prompted the government to protect its beach-goers with drum lines set out to cull great whites, which were responsible for the majority of fatalities. But drum lines don’t discriminate, and the program was controversial because researchers feared they would harm the region’s biodiversity by ensnaring other fish.

The drum lines captured 172 sharks, with 68 meeting the criteria for culling. Out off all the sharks, however, none were actually great whites. 94% were tiger sharks that have not been responsible for a Western Australian fatality since before 1930. Nevertheless, they were still killed.

The culling prompted the Australian Environmental Protection Agency call things off, stating there was “scientific uncertainty” about killing a population of sharks that had nothing to do with the fatalities that prompted the cull in the first place.^[4]

6 Marius the Worthless Giraffe

Marius the giraffe was the victim of an international breeding program designed to expand the giraffe population in zoos. The program was so successful that Marius’ genetic material was no longer of value to any zoo in the program. Letting Marius breed with any one of the program’s giraffes would have caused inbreeding in the population, so Marius was declared valueless and destined for, quite literally, the chopping block.

The decision to cull Marius just because he was of no value to a breeding program naturally caused an uproar. The zoo had allowed him to be born and live on its grounds, but when he was no longer useful, they decided to kill him.

The option of sterilizing him came up, but the zoo said that he would still take up resources that could be used to support viable genetic breeders. Other zoos offered to take Marius in, but the Copenhagen zoo would only share its giraffes with zoos that adhered to certain guidelines in its breeding program. It denied all offers.

So, without any use for Marius, and after refusing to relocate him, the zoo killed him. An autopsy and dismemberment was performed in front of an audience, one that included children. Afterwards, parts of Marius were saved for research while others were fed to the zoo’s carnivores.

Regarding all the outrage, an official said that they did not understand it.^[5]

5 Widespread Human Death

When China’s communist government rose to power in 1949, disease was running rampant throughout the country. It began a vaccines and sanitation campaign that included eliminating the animal carriers of the diseases. It was called the The Four Pests Campaign because it focused on the culling of mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows.

Millions of kilograms of flies and mosquitoes were eliminated, as well as an estimated 1.5 billion rats. By all accounts the campaign was a roaring success, until people realized the ecological disaster that culling 1 billion sparrows created in the countryside. Sparrows were carriers of disease, but they also played a vital role in the ecosystem. Eliminating so many of them left a gaping hole in China’s food chain that had dire consequences.

China had been implementing the Great Leap Forward, where people were ordered to stop agricultural work and begin creating steel. But ignoring agricultural production meant that people did not have enough food. Starvation was already widespread at the time of the Four Pests Campaign, and the elimination of sparrows meant that insects like locusts exploded in population. This devastated what grain was still left after the government’s industrialization campaign. Millions died in what became known as the Great Famine of China.^[6]

4 Emus Defeat the Australian Army

After WWI, Australian soldiers returned home to government-subsidized plots of land they were given to raise wheat and sheep. Unfortunately, some of the land they were given was difficult to actually raise anything on. This, coupled with the start of the Great Depression, made life difficult for the inexperienced farmers.

Then there were the emus.

The thousands strong population of emus did not leave when the soldiers-turned-farmers took over their land. They stayed, and started to eat their crop, which further devastated the struggling farmers’ livelihood. Once protected animals, the emus were reclassified as pests to be eliminated. The government wanted them dead so badly they paid hunters bounties for each emu they brought in.

Emus are resilient birds, though. Despite the culling, they maintained their numbers. The farmers did not have the resources to kill so many birds, so the Australian government brought in the army to begin the Great Emu War.

The army hunted them with machine guns, but the emus scattered so far the soldiers only ever succeeded in killing a few hundred out of thousands. The army tried again and again to mount military campaigns against the birds, but in the end, the emus won the war.

The army eventually just gave up and gave the ammunition to the farmers. Now, properly supplied, the farmers (who, we will remind you, were war veterans) succeeded in culling nearly 60,000 in half a year.^[7]

3 Sewing Rodent Anuses Shut

Nutria, also known as coypu, are an invasive species of rodent on almost every continent. The are native to South America, but international trading and breeding farms saw them spread all over the world. Eventually, some either escaped or were released into the wild, where they bred and spread.

One researcher in Korea came up with a particularly novel idea to be rid of the rodents. He suggested that they capture several nutria and sew their anuses shut. This would stress them, he said, which would cause them to eat their babies. He had once used this very same technique when he worked for a zoo with rat problems. Apparently, sewing their anuses shut had eliminated every single one of the pests.

Despite the technique’s apparent success, animal rights groups took issue with it. They said that causing the animal enough pain to drive it to cannibalism is unethical and constitutes abuse. Unsurprisingly, the researcher’s suggestion fell on deaf ears and his plan was never instituted.^[8]

2 Mauritius Culls Endangered Animal, Makes Things Worse

The Mauritius flying fox is classified as an endangered animal. Since 2015, the government has culled more than half of its population in order to make life easier for plantation owners. The foxes caused around 10% of the loss growers of mangos and lychees suffer each year, so a cull was implemented to stem losses.

The result was a decrease in yearly yield. Ecologists say that the flying fox is an important pollinator for more than half of the island’s flora. Moreover, when the government instituted its cull, it quickly found that shooting the bats that were eating fruit on plantations was extremely difficult, so the hunters went into the mountains and killed them in their native habitat. The flying fox, however, tends to stick to one area, so killing the ones in the mountains meant that they were not actually doing anything to address the loss of the plantation fruit. Some conservationists claim that the government is simply keeping the culling going in order to win votes instead of actually fixing the problem. Conservationists filed a lawsuit against the Mauritius government to halt the culls.^[9]

1 The Complicated World of Canadian Seal Hunting

The Canadian Seal hunt is an annual and extremely controversial event where tens of thousands of seals are hunted for meat, fur, other products, and, some say, population control. But many countries around the world have banned seal products imported from Canada. This helped lead to such an extreme decrease in demand that anti-hunting activists say profits from the hunt are now almost twice as less than what the government spends to monitor it. The Canadian government, however, says that the hunt has other indirect economic benefits and still supports the cull.

One group that claims they do not see these economic benefits is the Inuit. The native peoples of Canada hunt seals as a part of their ancient culture and for survival. International bans on seal products exempt the Inuits, but the demand has plummeted due to the contempt the government-sponsored hunt has brought.

Some are now saying that an expansion of the hunt is necessary in order to protect the local salmon population, since salmon are the prey of seals. Scientists disagree, saying that the seals are only being used as a scapegoat. Regardless, the seal hunt is important to the survival of certain Canadian communities. But opponents argue that if the Canadian government stopped subsidizing it, the free market would let it go extinct as an unsustainable business.^[10]

About The Author: Mike spends his free time at the beach enjoying the sun.