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Rat Hat

What do you get when you put a person's head in a small box with 24 large rats? You wind up with a great Fear Factor stunt and some very stressed out animal wranglers.

The wranglers had good reason to be nervous about our rat hat stunt. Something you have to understand about rats is that they are unpredictable. No matter how many precautions you take, there's always a chance they can attack. And rats have teeth strong enough to chew through concrete walls.

The head wrangler was so concerned about the safety of this stunt that he personally placed his head in the 17-inch square torture box as the rats were dropped in for a test. His biggest worry was that the rats would start fighting with each other and cause a crazy riot all around his head. He had been bitten before by rats and knew just how serious their chomps could be.

Fortunately, there were no mishaps during the wrangler's test. But it was a pretty tense situation as we watched to make sure the rats behaved themselves. Of course, all the testing in the world does not guarantee a safe stunt. We decided we'd need to have a second wrangler standing close by with a bucket of water just in case we had to douse any potential rat riots.

To make things even more difficult, we came up with a game that required the contestants to simultaneously put their bare hand into a box filled with two dozen smaller rats (half black, half white) and sort them, by color, into two bins. Now, the contestants would have to worry about getting bitten on both their face and their hands.

Oh, and there was one other thing the contestants had to contend with-rat poop, and lots of it. So how did our contestants do spending two minutes in a small box with all those stinky rats? You'll just have to watch to find out...

by Rich Brown