Behind the Bastards - The Ballad of Eel Horse

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Garrison is joined by Robert Evans to discuss “feaguing” in horses and why eels keep being shoved up butts.Footnotes: https://eels.historiacartarum.org/uncategorized/feaguing-before-there-was-ginger/ https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/in-medieval-england-salesmen-shoved-eels-up-their-horses-anus-to-make-a-sale/ http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=C2157C728777E8144EADA1012862CC8A https://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Vietnam/sub5_9b/entry-3358.html https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbxz5a/figging-putting-ginger-up-butt-kink https://www.surgjournal.com/article/S0039-6060(03)00076-X/fulltext http://shanghaiist.com/2010/05/01/man_in_sichuan_dies_after_friends_i/ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/eel-be-embarrassed-morning-hospital-removes-asparagus-sized-eel-man-s-rectum-8168078.html?amp http://www.stuff.co.nz/editors-picks/8560745/Eel-X-ray-hospital-staff-disciplined https://www.gawker.com/5994144/chinese-man-requires-emergency-surgery-after-the-swamp-eel-he-stuck-up-his-butt-gnaws-through-his-colon https://metro.co.uk/2013/04/09/man-hospitalised-with-live-eel-stuck-up-his-bum-3589255/ https://metro.co.uk/2014/10/29/man-has-eel-like-fish-surgically-removed-from-bum-4927628/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3361785/constipated-man-inserts-live-eel-up-his-bum/ https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Unusual-cause-of-colonic-perforation-secondary-to-%3A-Yao-Huang/a1ca0702d6a4516ffd06527bc4a36ac69dc680aa  http://www.ijcem.com/files/ijcem0085912.pdf  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7894305/Man-swallows-two-live-eels-treat-constipation-following-folk-remedy.html https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/slimy-15-inch-eel-removed-22233923  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202107/1229761.shtml Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's riddled with gonorrhea, my... Sophie, how do I finish this? I don't want to know. Well, it is slightly applicable for today. Oh good, okay, well this is behind the bastards, the podcast with a slightly applicable introduction for the first time in quite a while.

I'm Robert Evans, your host normally, but not today because today my buddy Garrison is here. Hi, Garrison. Greetings. Garrison has a very special story. I really don't know what to expect here. Should I start by giving the background? Yeah, yeah. Ever since I've known Robert, Robert's had a dream.

A mystic vision, really. So, for a little bit of background on me, I spent a lot of time living in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, and I developed a love for cooking food in pits buried under the ground. You wrap up a bunch of meat, like a turkey stuffed with stuff, and you wrap it in a foil, and you bury it, and you build a fire around it, and you cook it over the course of like a day while you're drinking heavily. It's a great way to make a turkey. I do it around the holidays a couple of times a year when I have the opportunity. And several years ago, I had a dream, and I saw a vision of a horse stuffed with eels and cooked underground in a pit fire.

And I've never been able to get it out of my head. I was working on... I was briefly in contact with someone who thought they could get me one last year, and I fucked that up because my mom got cancer, and I wound up, like, I don't know, just not being great at correspondence for a while. Let's not call that you fucked it up. You were work-dealing with something awful. Well, if you're that person, hit me up again, because I still want the horse. But my dream is to get a horse that has been obviously gutted, stuff it full of eels. Lampraise are acceptable. That's a kind of eel. Any kind of eel will be fine. Stuff it full of eels. Wrap the fucker up in either foil or maybe even, like, banana leafs,

if we want to do it, like, really, you know, pro or burlap or something, and then bury it, you know, a foot... well, not even a foot underground. Like, just bury it to where it's at, like, ground level, cover it in dirt, and keep a big circular fire going around it for probably, like, 20 hours. I'm guessing that's how long it's going to take. I seriously wish the listeners could see Garr's face right now. What? Oh, sorry, my camera's on you. What does Garrison look like?

Just an absolute smirk. Anyway, this has been my dream for some time. Yeah, you constantly talk about it. It's all I want out of the world. Yeah. You're going to win that for me today, Garrison? Well, kind of. We'll see. A little piece to my own medicine.

So, yeah. Well, one night, I was doing an extremely hardcore gaming session with a friend of mine, and for some reason, Eel Horse came up, because just Robert talks about it all the time, so for some reason, this idea of Eel Horse came up over the course of our very intense gaming session. And so, my friend had the bravery to put the words, Eel and Horse into Google, and that led us down a pretty nightmare at Stratford Hole

that I knew had to become a bastard episode, which leads us to now, our discussion of the real-life Eel Horse and the Eel-wielding bastards of today. Oh, I'm very excited. Yeah, so we're going to start off by going way back to the late medieval period in England. Good time. Everything was fine.

And the bustling business of selling horses. So, let's say you're an old-timey horse salesman. You got yourself some horses that you want to sell, but the problem... This one gets 16 apples to the league. Yeah, but the problem is that some of your horses are getting a bit old. A little sluggish, they're not as lively

as they used to be in their youth. Sure, that's what happens to horses. Sorry, I'm already laughing because I know where this is going. So, you're thinking, what could I do to make these horses a bit more spry and lively? And then, very similarly... Very similar to your vision, what I'm guessing happens is, basically,

you're thinking, what can I do? And then, God comes down to you from the clouds and says, my horse salesman child, have you considered putting a live eel up the horse's butt? Oh, my God. Yes! Wait what, you reply to God? How will that solve my problem?

And then, God, in his divine wisdom, speaks to you from the heavens and says, well, a live eel inserted up the horse's anus might stimulate the horse and make it appear to be younger and in its more active years, thus fetching a higher price for your inactuality older horses. You are telling me, Garrison, that shoving a live eel up the ass of an aging horse was the old-timey equivalent of, like,

turning back the odometer on a used car? Oh, yeah, baby. That fucking rules. So, upon comprehending your godly enlightenment, you thank the Lord for gifting you a piece of his everlasting wisdom in your divine vision. Oh, Father in heaven, I, your humble servant, am eternally grateful for your blessing me

with this prosperous inspiration. I'll go forth and place as many eels up the rectum of elder horses just as you say it, and I shall spread this gospel of eel horse to the other horse sellers so we may all share in your holy riches. And I'm pretty sure that's how it went, because throughout the 1500s, possibly earlier,

it's unclear when this started, but it definitely was very popular throughout the 1500s and early 1800s. That's amazing. Yeah, so inserting live eels up the back into horses, the horses that were past their prime to make them appear more, like, frisky and young. Yeah, because they have an eel that's moving around

in their asshole. The phrase that keeps coming up is that when they were looking to buy horses, a good sign of a horse was that it carries its tail well. It means the tail is, like, upright and, like, almost erect. It's very fluffy. The same thing's true of people. Well, furries, at least.

Furries, yeah. And the eel thing, very much, the phrase that they kept using was, like, that putting the eel up helps keep the tail held well. Because, again, because there's an eel up the horse. I'm just imagining generations of, like, marks buying lemon horses and, like, God damn it, they eeled this one, too!

That is exactly what happens. You gotta check the asshole, Mitch, I told you that. Never buy a used horse without checking the asshole! So, yeah, inserting live eels at the back of some horses, Pastor Prime was very common to make them appear more frisky and young. And do you know what type of eel? I mean, whatever eels were available in England. So, like, probably lamb praise, right?

It's hard to say, because there's not extremely thorough documentation of this. Most of the documentation comes from dictionaries and literary references. So you hear this, like, appearing in, like, poems and stories. It'd be, like, describing what selling horses was like. Yeah. Wow, it's definitely...

So there's two kinds of eels in the UK, silver and conjure. It's not a conjure eel, because look up the conjure eel. Look up the size of this thing. I mean, I'm not sure. These are like the size of horses. My God. Oh, my God.

Jesus. Your message. Yeah, no, it's not a conjure eel. It's not a conjure eel. That looks like an alligator. Wow. That is... That is...

That is discomfortingly large. That is terrifying. I am upset at how big that eel is. No, that is... I'm generally pro eel, but that is too... Okay, it's probably a silver eel looks more manageable. So I'm guessing it's a silver eel. Yeah, you can fit one of those up a horse's ass.

No problem. So I don't know what happened. Oh, yeah. It'll go right up an asshole. Can I just say this was not what I thought was going to be happening today. I couldn't be happier. So, yeah, often what would happen would be

when people would come into the showroom to see the horses, the stable boys would shove the eels up there really quickly. Incredible. When people were coming to visit. Wow. So... Oh, this fucking rules.

So there is a word for this. The process was called figging or to fig a horse. Jesus Christ. We find reference to this process in the excellent classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue. A few copies of this have figging. I'm going to read from one from 1785. It says to fig is to put a live eel up the horse's

fundament to make him lively and carry his tail well. The author goes on to note that the practice was so widespread that, quote, it is said, a forfeit is incurred by any horse dealer's servant who shall shoe a horse without figging him first. So, pretty good. Jesus Christ. Pretty good stuff.

Incredible. You know, I make a lot of jokes about the war against the horses, but like, it's hard to name an animal that's taken more hits for the team, the team being humanity, than the horse. Like the horse? We have fucked them over for so... Like dogs were like, yeah, you want to be best friends

and like hunt together and hang out and we'll give you food. With horses, we're like, you know what machine guns are? You're about to learn. It's your job to run towards them. Yeah, horses have taken a decent amount of abuse. We've really, yeah, I didn't know that this had happened, but this is rough. Yeah, figging.

What's really fun is that you can find a good number of references to this phenomenon in literary writing from the time. In 1616, there was a book of poems published by the then late poet Thomas Overbury, and it included an array of poetic character sketches of like, unsavory types of people written by various anonymous authors. One of these poems...

Excellent, excellent. One of these poems details the characteristics of an errant horsecorser, and noted that among other unsavory habits, the man knows how to cover up diseases and defects of all sorts. For pounding his horse's arse with quicksilver and giving him suppositories of live eels, he's an expert. Pretty decent.

Referring to putting a live eel up an ass as a suppository. Suppository of live eels, yeah. That is incredible. That is amazing. Garrison, I'm very proud of you. He is expert. Expert act. An errant horsecorser.

Aw, man. Man, maybe this is how I prepare the eel horse. I didn't think about starting it while the horse was alive. No. No, I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. No. You realize that these are supposed to be bad guys, right?

Like, like... They're literally the used car salesmen of the medieval period. The medieval period, yes. And they're shoving live eels up the horse's butts. Come down to Slick Joe's Discount Horse Depot. Absolutely no eels up their assholes. A young John Milton mentioned fegging in... Incredible.

In a 1628 Latin poem while mocking his fellow Cambridge students. He described a certain Irish bird as, quote, more useful to grooms because they are, by nature, lively and brisk and prancing. And if they were forced into the anus of a scraggly horse, they would make them livelier and quicker than if they had 10 live eels of their bellies. Wow.

Garrison, I want to congratulate you here because, for years, Sophie will back me up on this, I have been trying to work in paradise lost connections to behind the bastards. Hasn't happened yet. We just don't go far back enough. But you finally brought old Jay Milt into it. Old Jay Milt.

Just rolls off the top. Yeah, Jay Milt. Kanye West of 1628. Yeah. Yeah, that's what everyone says. The humorist poet Edward Ward in his 1700 song upon dancing wrote that dancers skip with a nimble force as eels at the belly of a horse, which jockeys use

each market day to make them dance, as people say. So that's nice. Nice little rhyme, actually. Yeah, he had a decent little thing going. So yeah, unfortunately, depending on the perspective, by the late 1700s and early 1800s, the eel anal insertion had begun to fall out of fashion. As horse salesmen realized, probably again,

via divine revelation from the Lord, that the same effect, or at least a similar effect, could be achieved by instead inserting a piece of spicy ginger up the horse's arse. And this is apparently still an issue at horse shows that people have to enforce. Stop people from shoving ginger up their arse. Ginger up the butt of horses to make, yeah.

This is still like an ongoing problem that needs enforcement at horse shows. Yeah, yeah. The ginger police. Yeah. But that means, though, if you went back to shove an eels up their arses, nobody would catch it. They're not still checking for eel.

I'm just telling you, if you want to cheat at having nice horses, eels, that's wide open, baby. Yeah. Get an eel. Try an electric one. Maybe that's how I'll cook it, Garrison. I don't think so. OK.

Well, we'll talk about it. Yeah. But we still do actually have the modern phrase to ginger up or to spice up a horse. This comes from figging. I've never heard of that phrase, but I'll trust you on that. It's a phrase. And this is also where we get to the modern

BDSM practice called figging. Again, driving from the figging. But figging is usually a butt plug made of ginger placed up someone's anus. And we will circle back to this at the end because this will help us explain a modern eel issue we have. Yes. Modern eel issues are very serious.

Yeah. Speaking of eel shoes. Eel shoes. Speaking of eel shoes, do you know who else wants you to buy live eels to stick up the butts of horses? Oh, gosh. I mean, Jesus. Jesus.

Our friends at, I don't know, one of the food. Yeah. We call it stimulation therapy. Yeah. Yes. Stimulation. People who make those fucking, those, those with, with, with, all of our sponsors.

Oh my gosh. Obviously, they are all huge fans of shoving eels and assholes. In fact, that's the only requirement we have of our sponsors. If you put an eel in something's butt, doesn't have to be a horse. And in fact, oftentimes it's a completely different species. We like it when they get creative. And that's the behind the bastards guarantee. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the

United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

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All right, Garrison, I'm ready. Uh-huh. So, yeah. So, the first bastards of today are the 14th through 17th century horse salesman. But unfortunately, we still have some time left in this episode, as you can tell. And once me and my friends started Googling Elon Anus, this let us down a dark rabbit hole that forever scarred my mind. Yeah, I can see how that would go to some bad places, actually.

And unfortunately, we're going to be briefly moving away from horses and towards another H species called humans. No. Which leads us to probably the darkest most evil segment of today's episode. Excellent. The Phoenix program. Oh, that sounds like a good thing to be involved in assholes being filled with eels. The Phoenix program was a brutal counterinsurgency program started in 1968

and run by William Colby, later head of the CIA. It was aimed at reading out Viet Cong, or anyone deemed Viet Cong sympathizers. The Viet Cong was anybody that we happen to bomb. Yeah. Yeah. So, we need anyone deemed Viet Cong sympathizers by identification and neutralization with the methodology of infiltration,

capture, terrorism, torture, and assassination. The Phoenix program was designed, coordinated, and executed primarily by the CIA with some help by the United States Special Operations Forces during the war in Vietnam. Versions of the program were kind of an operation between 1965 and 1972, but the official program and the official body count begun in 68. Similar programs existed both before and after that period, but for the official Phoenix program, it starts in 68, goes to 72. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had, quote-unquote, neutralized at least 81,640 people,

suspected of being operatives or sympathizers of the Viet Cong, at least 26,000 of whom were officially killed, but South Vietnamese officials estimate over 40,000 were killed. Military intelligence officer K. Milton Osborn wrote a book about his time there and witnessed the following forms of torture, including the use of inserting a six-inch dowel into the cavity of a detainee's ears and tapping the dowel through the brain until the person dies. You tax dollars at work, people.

A lot of starvation to death inside a cage. I'm going to read a quote now. Other methods of torture used in the interrogation centers include rape, gang rape, rape using heart objects, rape followed by murder, electric shock by attaching wires to the genitals, and rape using eels and snakes. This is the most fucking evil humanity can do. The Phoenix program is up there on the most evil things.

It's Nazi-level shit. That's straight up on the same level. It's the most bastard you can be. The horrific abuses done in the Phoenix program by the American government, and there was assistance from the South Vietnamese government, assistance from Australia, but it was mostly the American government. It is the most possibly evil thing about the Phoenix program in detail. That's the highest. We'll do a whole thing.

No, they deserve their own series, honestly. There will be several episodes. We'll get it after the nine-part Kissinger series. William Colby and the CIA in the Vietnam War, it's extremely, extremely cool. Yeah, it's a fucking nightmare. People talk rightly about Unit 731, which was a Japanese military detachment that did biological and chemical warfare research

that involved some of the worst stories of torture and experiment. Dr. Mengele and we talk about these as if these are unique horrors of fascist countries. I guess you could say they're unique horrors of fascist countries, because certainly within the context of our policies in Vietnam, the United States was doing some fashy as hell shit. The shit that the CIA pulled in Vietnam is that same level, that exact same level. It is not devaluing the horrors of the Holocaust or of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria to put this kind of shit.

I mean, they're raping people with eels. Until they die, yeah. Until they're raping people to death with eels. Like, what are you... Yeah, I was aware of this sort of thing, mainly with snakes and stuff. Yeah, so after some of the details of the abuses... I like this less than the horse... No, yeah, this is definitely less fun.

So after some of the details of the horrific abuses by the CIA and army that was carried out in Vietnam, they slowly came to light in the early 70s. The program was officially shut down under public pressure, but in actuality, it just continued under a different name, and some of the control the program was handed to the South Vietnam government. And yeah, it's kind of hard to pivot away from something this dark, but I'm going to think of it as a way to help kind of wash down the human filth that we just discussed. Because now we are going to discuss the modern eel anus problem.

Oh, good. I'm glad we're getting up to the modern day. Exciting. Yeah, this is a thing with multiple facets, and a sizable portion of which is an extension of the figging-feaging connection. Jesus Christ, okay. Well, good. Actually, this is good. I would prefer an extension of that. It goes back to the horses. Yeah.

Thank God. April 2013, in the Guangdong province of China, a destructively horny, a single 39-year-old man was watching. Fantastic. Everything's coming together for this story. Was watching an eel-figging porn, and he had the uncontrollable urge to try it himself. Wait, wait, watching? He was watching an eel-figging porn.

Wait, what year is this? I think you said 1813. No, this is 2013. Oh, 2013. I miss her. Modern. How is he watching porn? Modern. No, no. Okay.

Yeah, 2013, horribly horny 39-year-old man was watching an eel-figging porn, and he had the uncontrollable urge to try it himself. That exists, huh? That exists. Oh, I see that. I've been researching this episode. I've seen about every video of eels going into bodies on the internet. Yeah, okay.

Well, that's good. Yeah, it's a lot. We should watch Zoo together, Garrison. Anyway, so he had to try it himself, and he tried to just, he tried to grab, he tried to keep holding the eel for the duration of the period, but he lost the- That's probably a good idea if you can. But he lost a grip of this slippery little fucker. Oh, see, that's rookie shit.

You got to get a rope around that eel, you know? And it swam all the way up there. Yeah, that's going to happen. After failed attempts to remove the eel, the man went to the emergency room for medical assistance, and he told the presumably confused medics, please, please help me. The eel is moving through my body. Imagine, that's just your fucking day, right? Like you're six hours into a shift, you're getting ready to go home, you're tired,

you've already seen some shit, and then this kid's like there is an eel moving inside of me for undetermined reasons. Yeah. And like, that's the rest of your fucking night. Yep, so the 20 centimeter long eel chewed the way through the man's colon, perforated his large intestine, and became stuck in the body cavity. The medical team that treated the man reportedly said to the eel, which weighed about a pound, was, quote, simply trying to find its way out.

Yeah, like a fair play by the eel. Yeah, the metal's not doing anything wrong. None of the things we're talking about today is the eel's fault. None of what we're talking about today is the fault of the eel. So far as to say that nothing has ever been an eel's fault? No. Because they're eels. No, this is just on us, totally on us.

The medical team said the eel was still alive when we got it out, but it died soon afterwards, which was probably a mercy. So yeah, I've read every single story of eels going up people's butts that you can find on the internet. And a decent amount of these incidents track, I think, a decent amount of them do track back to getting the idea from porn. But that is far from the only cause of eel anal penetration. Oh, good.

Because that would be unreasonable. Yeah, so three years prior, back in 2010, a 59-year-old chef from the Z-Gong city of China went to the hospital complaining of abdominal pain, dehydration, and a great deal of anal bleeding. And he truly did not know what was going on. He actually had no idea. So doctors also had no idea what was the cause of this,

and they resorted to cutting open his innards, in which they discovered a 50-centimeter-long Asian swamp eel lodged in his rectum. It was already dead, but the eel had apparently already wreaked havoc through the inside of his body, biting the way through his intestines prior to dying, internal bleeding, and infection rapidly set in. The man was hospitalized.

Oh, that's a big eel. That is not a small eel to have inside you. It's large. That's slightly too big to get in a horse's asshole, is my guess. A lot of them are small, you could. So I've not included pictures in the script here, but basically, for every story from the Chinese hospitals,

the Chinese hospitals upload all of these pictures. It is absurd how many pictures of, and videos of these procedures, they upload themselves. Like, entire videos of them surgically doing this. It's pretty nightmarish. So yeah, the man was hospitalized for 10 days, but he eventually died. So this did kill him.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Again, we should watch Zoo. Afterwards, the probable cause was actually established. So the chef had been drinking with friends, and he had passed out. His friends then decided it would be in the news. God, no. They decided it would be an amusing prank

to insert a live eel up his anus while he was comatose and not tell him. Oh, my God. I mean, look, I've done some things I regret while drinking, but I have always informed people when I've put a live eel inside them. That's just basic decency. We have a friend who falls asleep often while watching movies,

and we sometimes mess with them. We stack things on their head, all sorts of things. But I think this is too far, honestly. I would say killing them via an eel eating their internal organs is taking a prank a little more. I think it's too much. I think it's too much. I'm all for committing to the bit,

but honestly, I think this is too far. I think it's too much. You know what? You know where I think they went wrong is when they were shoving a live animal up their friend's asshole. As the person was asleep? Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe that was the issue.

Maybe that's where they went awry. Yeah. So this is one of the few instances that is totally not this person's fault. And his friends, I think, were investigated and prosecuted by whatever authorities. Anyway, before we get to the big kicker, there is some other general kind of eel news worth mentioning.

2012, a man in New Zealand got an eel removed via surgery after the slippery fucker got stuck up his rectum. It wasn't officially revealed how or why it got up there. So that is left to us to decide. But the unique aspect of this story is that 33 hospital staff all got in trouble for sharing extra photos of the eel and leaking the story to the media.

It's interesting. Yeah, that's kind of shitty. It's totally different. In China, all of a sudden it gets uploaded. But in New Zealand, the hospital got mad that the employees were leaking pictures of this incident. Yeah, that's going to mean the next person who gets an eel stuck up their ass won't go to the doctor.

That is the thing. Which although I will say, if you're the kind of person who tortures a live animal to get off, I don't really care if you get medical treatment, I guess. Yeah, not really. Oh, and in 2014, a Brazilian man had emergency surgery to remove an eel from his backside. Again, the exact reasoning being unknown.

But I'm pretty sure both these incidents are related to kink stuff. And we're going to discuss this more towards the end because there is one other reason people claim for once they go to the doctor how they explain why an eel is up their butt. So onto the main eel, anal epidemic. So this starts in 2003, actually.

It's the first instance I can find of this, specifically in our modern documentation. I'm going to read directly from the hospital report. Now, this is somewhere in China. I'm not quite sure where, but the report doesn't specify exactly. And there isn't any other reporting of this incident besides this one hospital report.

So it's just this hospital report. Anyway, 50-year-old man was seen at the accident and emergency department because of abdominal pain. The physical examination revealed redness and swelling around the tissue around the abdomen. A shadow of an eel was noticed on the abdominal radiograph. Upon further questioning, the patient admitted that an eel was inserted into the rectum

in an attempt to relieve constipation. On a moral level, that's, I guess, better than putting an eel up your ass for sexual gratification on an intellectual level. Why would you think that would work? If it's true. Anyway, emergency laparotomy found that the 50-centimeter-long eel

was biting the spleenic flexure of the colon. Multiple perforations were found around the walls of the rectum, and the post-operative course was uneventful. The patient was discharged onto home on, like, day seven. So this appears to be the most claimed reason given by people found to have an eel up their butt on why said eel is up their butt.

They most often claim constipation. And there has been a decent uptick in reported incidents of eel up the anus to cure constipation since 2017. In April 2017, 49-year-old factory worker from the capital of South China's Guangdong province was rushed to the hospital complaining of constipation and a stomach ache.

Upon the doctors opening up the man's stomach to discover both feces and a foot-and-a-half-long eel, the man claimed it's fine up their butt. The man claimed it's fine up there by itself. Okay, well, so I got a couple of notes. He suffered from a puncture pancreas, and according to the doctors, the eel managed to break through the man's intestines

and generated a mess in the man's stomach, almost killing him. Yeah, sounds right. Don't do that with an eel. Yeah, so according to the doctors, the man later gave more details post-operation. Quoting said doctors. But he later admitted that he put it up there himself

following a quote, folk remedy for bowel obstruction. As a medical expert, the doctor noted that there was no scientific basis for such a treatment involving live eels. That's a bummer. Yeah. Okay, so do you know how to cancel an Amazon order?

Because I just had, I was just trying to rush a shipment of eels to my house, but I guess I don't need them now. You can cancel. You go to the orders page. Oh, oh, yeah, there we go. Yeah. The man survived this.

It was unclear what happened to the eel, so. Probably not a great story for the eel. Yeah. Would you want to live after that though? No, no. So apparently what happened, upon further interviewing, he said that he went to his friends for medical advice,

and they told him about a quote, folk lower method of curing constipation, which involved a live eel, to help smooth bowel movement. So he found a 20-inch Asian swamp eel, and after the deed had been done, he got him into the hospital after he started experiencing unbearable stomach aches.

So, and what's really upsetting, this is by no means an isolated incident. Next time we're talking about is September 2018. Again, reading from a hospital report, colonic perforation is a common presentation at the emergency department. However, foreign body-related perforation is responsible for less than 1% of these cases.

Here we describe the case of colonic perforation secondary to the self-introduction of an eel into the anus. A 54-year-old previously healthy male presented himself to the emergency department with a 12-hour history of abdominal pain. Physical examination revealed tenderness, rebound tenderness, and involuntary guarding. A CT scan of his abdomen and pelvis

revealed a foreign body in his cavity. Upon further questioning, the patient admitted the eel was inserted into his anus by accident. Well, yeah. Okay. Look, we've all put some things up our assholes by accident. By accident? Not living animals.

Accident? Sure. Pieces of the Monopoly board game of course. Pieces of firearms, absolutely. Accidents. Knives. Yes, it happens. But not a live animal.

That was the entire, it was an accident. There was no clarification. That's it. Uh-huh. Great. So he underwent a laparotomy and the eel was subsequently removed. He was transferred to the standard ward

from the emergency ward after seven days of observation. Diagnosing a colonic foreign body can be challenging. As patients often deny the insertion. Yeah, fair. A CT scan is recommended. I wouldn't want to admit to that. A CT scan is recommended for patients having a suspected colonic foreign body.

So that's a hospital report. But this, you know what else you want to deny the presence of, Robert? Washington State Patrol ads. Black rifle coffee ads. Chevron ads. Wait, what is it? Chevron. Oh, I hope it's Chevron.

I love Chevron. Get some Chev ads. Our next season of podcast is going to be entirely supported by Chevron. Chevron. Fuck it. Why not? What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks

in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads?

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country,

the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, available podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Yep, talking about eels still.

Still. Wow. I watched... Eels up inside you. I spent so long on this episode doing research. Mighty Boosh? Anybody thought that? Too much time. I spent too much time researching this. Anyway, January of 2020, there was another similar incident. But with a fun twist, instead of goofing the eels,

a 51-year-old construction worker in East China's Guangxi province swallowed two live eels to reportedly treat his constipation. Well, I guess that's better. It's different. It's not better. It's different. What I'll say is better, is there's no question that it wasn't a sex thing. That is true. That seems like a legitimate question. One of the instances that it probably wasn't a sex thing.

Because again, I think part of the problem here is once this constipation myth got started, or lie got started, people are going to hear about it, and then people might start actually doing it genuine. People might start doing it genuine. People take Joe Rogan's advice on how to treat diseases. They're very stupid. So yeah, he was rushed to the hospital by his colleagues, where he revealed that he consumed the eels the day before.

During surgery, they found a, quote, very thick eels lodged outside of the intestines in the lower part of his abdomen. Oh, wow. Because a lot, quoting the doctor, because the eels were alive while being swallowed, a person's intestines are fragile. Therefore, they will be ruptured as soon as the eels bite them, said the doctors.

Oh, really? Amazing. So our intestines are not, we did not evolve to have our intestines bitten by eels. This is shocking to me. They found a two-centimeter-wide hole in the sigmoid colon. Medics said he was in a state of shock due to life-threatening bacterial infection around the ruptured colon. He was left in critical condition. The 51-year-old man was allegedly following a programity

in which claims that gobbling live eels could help pass solid waste according to the surgeon. Yes. Yeah. Good. Great. Yeah. Based... June 2020.

An unnamed patient aged in his 50s sought medical attention, again, in China's southern province of Guangdong, after suffering a pain in his abdomen for about a week. Jesus Christ. Good God. Good God in heaven. Ah. By this time, he had severe sepsis, leading to septic shock, and was unable to communicate coherently according to the surgeon.

Shocking. Very surprising. Again, quoting said surgeon. Who could have anticipated this? During a CT scan, we suspected a foreign body in his... Abdominal garrison. Abdominal cavity. But we couldn't tell what it was. Then, while performing a colonoscopy,

we discovered it was a nation's swamp field that entered the... that entered the cavity. Yeah. Yeah. The patient then had an emergency operation to have the eel removed from his gut, with doctors opening up his abdomen and discovering it filled with waste matter, including excrement and pus

from his severe infection. Yeah. The hospital image shows the... Again, not included in the document for Sophie's sake. A 15-inch freshwater eel removed intact in the procedure. I can send you pictures afterwards, Robert. Please. I have a lot.

That sounds hot as hell. I'm great. This is how it starts, Robert. This is how it starts. I'm now eel curious. No. No, you're not. Stop it. You can buy things that do the same thing.

You can... You can buy things that are not live eels to do the same thing, Robert. You can get robotic stuff that does the same exact thing. You could also get an ovipositor if you're really into that stuff. That is... Those are pretty neat.

That's completely different. Those are pretty neat. I know. I know. I just said they're cool. I object to you doing this comparison. Those are classy. Yeah. I think they're neat.

All right. Anyway, quoting the doctor, the eel is already dead, but it's caused some veal bacterial contamination in his abdomen due to buildup of feces and pus. It was only after surgery when we were inquiring about his medical history that he told us he used the eel to cure his constipation.

He inserted it up his anus into his rectum. I suspect it was then that the perforation of his sycamore colon occurred. I also suspect that. That is also my guess, is that it occurred afterwards. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right.

Because he had inserted the live eel into himself, the chances of him dying were quite high had he not had the surgery in time. Again, quoting the doctor. The doctor said that the constipation cure, folk remedy thing is... He warned members of the public against doing this for some reason.

Yeah. The patient got discharged a days later and then allegedly purchased the common freshwater eel from a wet market according to the hospital. So we got one more. One more. A man again in the Guangxiu province of East China inserted a 20 centimeter long eel into his rectum

on July 20th, 2021. Allegedly in hopes of relieving constipation, but instead it almost took his life after the eel entered his abdomen. He finally went to the doctor after enduring pain on the first day as he was... But on the first day he didn't go... Basically, he didn't go on the first day

but went on the second day because he was too shy to see a doctor. Yeah, well, okay. To have to explain this to the doc. That keeps being an issue in these. This is an issue in these. I would say the primary issue is putting an eel inside yourself. The eel's up your butt, yeah.

The doctor who did the operation so that he could have lost his life as the bacteria in the large intestine may have caused hemolysis when it reached the abdominal... Jesus Christ. Abdominal cavity. There we go, there we go, you did it. According to the Chinese news outlet Global Times, what motivated the man to do so was a folk remedy

that says the eel can help with bowel movement. But instead of curing the constipation, the eel went inside the man's rectum, into the colon, and bit through it, entering from the colon into the abdomen. The eel was still alive by the time it was removed during operation. I hope it's lived a full life.

This is where things are going to tie back to the two eel horse. I was waiting for that. I think a lot of these incidents are in fact not due to constipation. Our people are just using that as an excuse so they don't have to admit the slightly more embarrassing reasoning being that they thought it was hot. Remember, only the first guy who mentioned actually admitted it to being a kink thing back in 2013,

but ever since the first story in 2017 of a guy claiming it's constipation, everyone is using this reason now. And I think a lot of these incidents are actually also kink stuff. So back to the figging, again, a derived from figging with the horse. With the rise of internet and porn,

I think this stuff's been getting more popular. And once the ginger figging isn't exciting you anymore, you know what you're going to do, that's right baby, return to tradition and use the original horse figging tool, the live eel. And that's what's going on. So I talked to our doctor friend Kava, who specializes in colon type stuff.

He specializes in colon stuff. No, he's the kind of doctor you want to ask about. He is the exact doctor to deal with this. So I talked to him about this, and he said he's heard of this constipation excuse before, but he too and his colleagues are skeptical and think that the constipation excuse is actually bullshit. Sure.

He told me that people get pretty creative when they start coming up with excuses for things they put in their rectum. Like he gave examples as I was doing pull-ups over a shampoo bottle, or I had an itch as, you know, reasons people bullshit for why they find weird things up their butt. So Kava says that this is probably a sex thing, and he could not find any basis for this folk remedy.

He could not see where this idea actually comes from. He talked to Chinese doctor friends of his, they're like, no, this isn't a thing. We don't know where this isn't actually a thing. And from my cursory examination, eel and more broadly, like tentacle stuff, is generally more popular in Asia and Japan and China than it is in the States, generally.

I mean, there is definitely its own thing here, but a lot of that also does come from anime. Most of the tentacle stuff is around anime. Yeah. And so I also talked with our friend Chris about this, and we surmised that the reason why this may be way more common in the Guangdong and eastern Chinese provinces is because those two areas produce an absurd amount of the world's eel exports.

And then the amount of eel exports have been rapidly increasing over the past 20 years, which means the people in those provinces have eels just around, like, and they're way more common and way more easily accessible than anywhere else in the world, basically. And they're a lot cheaper than whatever eel-based sex toys you're about to suggest, Garrison, thinking people ought to pay money

when there's free eels lying around to get off with. Because the other thing is, I've tried to really find all references to this folk remedy, folklore, method of curing constipation, and it only tracks back to one 2017 article. And anything before that, and the one 2003 incident as well. But that's it. There's really no other basis for there actually being a folklore origin.

Like, if any listeners have knowledge of this tracking back before 2003, please, please let me know. Because I've spent days looking for information about eel anal constipation in cures pre-2003 and pre-2017, and I can't find anything. And doctors in China also agree with this assessment. This is one final thing. There is one study from China looking at the eel anus phenomenon.

So they didn't actually study on this because they kept being a problem. Self-introduction of an eel into the anus, causing colonic perforation, is uncommon. But when it occurs, the reason may be due to a bizarre belief, an inadvertent sexual behavior, or a criminal assault. The situation is more common in men, about four to one. And once a live eel is inserted into the colon, it will bite through the wall of the colon,

migrating into the abdominal cavity through perforation, resulting in an accidental or opportunistic human pathogen similar to the Vibrio volifinicus infection. Cool. Diagnosing a colonic form body can be challenging because patients often deny the insertion. They have obscure anal pain, mucus discharge, lax anal tone, and fresh bleeding from the rectum.

Man, just an incredible number of band names in that sentence you just said. The most common presenting clinical features of colotic perforation are peritonal irritation with rebound tenderness and rigidity of the abdomen, accompanied by fever and rapid heartbeat. These features should raise the suspicion of a presence of a colonic foreign body.

Plain radiographs are useful in diagnosing the perforations. Or a CT scan is recommended if the findings are not definitive, or if the presence of a foreign body cannot be ruled in or out by radiographs alone. So, yeah, this is how we get from putting eels up horses butts to make them seem younger and carry their tail high and well to people dying and almost dying from eels eating their insides because you saw it in the porn video.

Excellent. But I really do love the actual linguistic pathway of a figging and then figging changing from eels to ginger, then the ginger thing changing from figging to figging for sex, and then it going back to eels. It's like full circle. It's just beautiful. The beauty of life.

It's like poetry at rhymes. It's like poetry at rhymes. Yeah, it's amazing how just a complete full circle moment of starting with eels with figging and ending with eels with figging. I love the human language. Humans are great except for all the horrible things that we do. So, yeah, this is, again, we probably shouldn't be doing this

as they're like a global pandemic and wasting hospital space because you keep shoving eels up your butt. Like a lot of these were for like three, three of these were from 2020. Like, guys, no, stop. Recommendation officially. No, stop, stop doing it. Get it up in there.

You can buy toys that do the same thing. You don't need to do the eels. Respectfully. Respectfully, Robert. Shut the fuck up. The eels can't consent. Get them in ya. The eels can't consent.

No, listen to Garrison. Do not listen to Robert. That is not my bastard's way. This actually does bring us full circle because what is perfectly safe and what is perfectly ethical is using ethically slaughtered horse and ethically fished eels to make an eel horse.

I mean, it is more ethical. It is more ethical than shoving an eel up your friend's butt as they are asleep and then them dying. That is true. So anyway, that is the ballad of eel horse and how we get from eel horse to our modern eel anal epidemic. Perfect.

Perfect lineage. Just amazing lineage. If you're out there and you've got a horse that's about to die of natural causes, we want to put eels in it and cook it. God. So hit us up. Find us online.

Sophie, what's your email? I would like to be excluded from this narrative, but it is. It is coolzonemedia.ihartmedia.com. Coolzonemedia.ihartmedia.com. Find us a horse carcass. Horribly, horribly named. If you've got a line on a significant quantity of raw eels,

we might need that too, but I think I can probably work with this. I'm going to leave. I'm going to end the call. You're going to cook the eel horse with me, Garrison. That's going to happen when we finally get the horse and the eels. Can I just say Garrison? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that I had to watch so many of these videos. I'm sorry you had to watch so many of these videos too. Purely academic. Purely academic. In fairness, absolutely no one asked you to do this. No one ever would have asked you to do this. But we're asking you, the listener at home, to check us out wherever podcasts are found. Yeah, follow us.

With Behind the Bastards. At Bastards Pod. It could happen here. At Happen Here Pod. I wrote a book called After the Revolution. Maybe the sequel will include an eel horse if it's tasty. Maybe that's the future of food. There's no way to know.

I do like that this is... I know we've covered a lot of darker topics on Behind the Bastards more recently. I do like this, this is a very nice light beacon in the Bastards totem pole. We are pretty low, relatively. I mean still, Phoenix program is pretty high. Yeah, that one's wrong. The horse salesman thing, they're pretty bad, but they're on the lower end. That's just funny.

I mean it is, it is animal. They're on the lower end of Bastards. It happened a long time ago. I have to have a bit of a lighter presence in this episode, so you're welcome for that. And yep, I'm done talking about this topic. We're done. Awesome. Alright, we'll come over, Garrison.

I'm going to cook crocodile tonight. I found a place that'll save the whole skin corpse tomorrow. I'm coming right over actually. Incredible. Excellent. Bye everybody. Bye. Bye.

Hey everybody, wanted to record a note. Some people on this subreddit got quite frustrated about some of the claims about the Phoenix program. They pointed out an Ask Historians thread, which doesn't put any shade on the specific claims made by the author, Douglas Valentines, about the eels and whatnot, but does generally have issues with his sourcing. At least one of his sources was... a guy that's very common when you're talking about Vietnam, which is like some dude who pretended to have done something that he hadn't or to have had a position that he hadn't.

You find this a lot on both sides of the war crimes discussion. I wanted to note that, number one, I'm not entirely convinced by that Ask Historians thread, because it's just a guy talking about why he doesn't think this is particularly credible. That thread, he talks about, one of his justifications is that eliminating insurgent infrastructure at a ground level is a basic counterinsurgency tactic, which yet is a basic counterinsurgency tactic. Counterinsurgency operations nearly always involve significant war crimes. You can see that no matter who is doing the counterinsurgency, whether it's Kenya or Afghanistan

with the Russians, war crimes are part and parcel of counterinsurgency. One of the reasons why we don't generally delve into this territory too much without doing it in a dedicated episode is that when you're talking about crimes against humanity, specifically ones the CIA was involved in, you've got a couple of different sources. Some of them are going to be declassified documents, which in a lot of cases you actually do have. Here's the CIA talking about fucked up shit they did. A lot of information was destroyed, a lot of stuff never got written down. A lot of times when you're talking about war crimes in a variety of countries, you're getting

human sources. Some of those will be victims, some of those will be guys who were in the CIA or who were in another military branch and who there's always different levels of credibility and shortcomings and inconsistencies in their stories. It's all complicated by the fact that debate over US war crimes in Vietnam within the United States is incredibly political. You can look at this when you're just trying to determine the actual body count. There's a massive ongoing debate about how many civilians were killed, specifically

and how many civilians were killed by the United States, but just how many died in general in Vietnam and Cambodia, and you can find historians arguing ad nauseum about this. One of the big debates with a lot of the kind of ground level war crimes, because on any objective level, the majority of war crimes, the US is responsible and Vietnam were committed from the air. But when you're talking about ground level war crimes like we were talking about here, you'll run into a couple of different books. Nick Terse's Kill Anything That Moves and Gary Kulick's War Stories, and these are very

proposed books, and you can find a lot of criticism about Terse's book online by historians. Kulick, who's critical of Terse, is generally seen as more credible. Kulick was also a US soldier in Vietnam. Again, there's always this tremendous amount of bias, no matter where you come at it from. Other people will point out that a lot of the early push to talk about US war crimes in Vietnam was funded by Hanoi, which you can say, yeah, and of course they have an agenda, but yeah, they were also the victims of a lot of war crimes. This is not a case where I feel like we necessarily got something wrong, because I'm not convinced

that the Douglas Valentine book is wrong, especially based on the evidence that we have. But it is worth noting that there is a tremendous amount of debate over all of this, and as a general rule, when we delve into stuff like this, we will try to make sure that it's in a thing focused on that, so that we can actually cover the swath of historiography on the subject, rather than kind of pass over a little bit of it and then lead people to think that, okay, well, what about this? What about this argument? What about that argument?

This is all incredibly political history, so that's what you get. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space, with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest?

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.