[2] During the Dutch Revolt, Diederik Sonoy, an ally of William the Silent, is documented to have placed a pottery bowl filled with rats open-side down on the naked body of a prisoner.
[8] The report of CONADEP in Argentina detailed the use of a torture method known as "the recto-scope" (reserved primarily for Jewish prisoners) which consisted of inserting living rats into a victim's rectum or vagina through a tube.
[8] Amnesty International documented the case of a woman tortured by the Chilean CNI (National Information Center, successor to the DINA) in 1981, who described being kept in a room full of live rats during interrogation.
[9] Serial killer Richard Kuklinski alleged in a series of interviews that one of his preferred methods of murder was to tie up a victim and leave them in a cave overnight so they could be eaten alive by rats.
On October 16, 2010, in Lakewood, New Jersey, David Wax was alleged to have threatened kidnap victim Yisrael Bryskman with rat torture unless he agreed to give his wife a get (Jewish divorce document).
The narrator lies on the rack and can only watch as a scythe swings back and forth, approaching closer each time, as rats swarm over his body.
In Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho, Patrick Bateman inserts a starving rat into a kidnapped woman's vagina through a pipe.
Season 2 of the HBO dark fantasy series Game of Thrones from 2012 also uses rat torture by the Tickler on prisoners of Gregor Clegane in Harrenhal.