Comment by nathanyz
5 years ago
I don't know about rats, but we called animal control on an aggressive gator. And the guy who came out sat down on the side of the pond with a boombox playing a cassette tape of some weird noises. Gator swam right up to him and he then disposed of it.
I don't know that it's that far fetched to think that at least the rats part could possibly have been true.
As for the gator cassette, I asked and was told it's gator mating sounds. The bad news was that he then said that to catch the mate, the cassette won't work and he would have to use chicken.
rats have ultrasound hearing, and children have higher range of hearing than adults, though not in ultrasound. While i don't subscribe to the literary version of a piper taking children away, it may have been noticed by the people back then that animals and children hear some flutes while adults - don't. (An example of a gruesome speculative version of events would be for example that it was used to sort "good" children say from "possessed", especially if children playing in the dirt/etc. were noticed to have say higher infection rate) The story don't mention nor dogs nor cats reacting to the piper, and that is natural given that it is a rat infested medieval city - getting rid of dogs and especially of cats (done back then for superstitious religious reasons ) would be the major way of getting into rat infestation in the first place.