- Naturally, we begin with a snake. In late May, a 10-foot python crawled from 38-year-old Atthaporn Boonmakchuay’s squat toilet in his home in Thailand and latched onto his penis. There are conflicting reports about what happened next. But somehow either Boonmakchuay and/or his wife tied the snake to the bathroom door with a rope of some kind before Boonmakchuay passed out — from the pain, blood loss or both. What exactly happened to his dick was never revealed by doctors, but his bathroom was a horror show; the all-white tile floors and walls looked as though they had been mopped in blood. The New York Post reported that the snake had taken hold for a good 30 minutes. Boonmakchuay, however, seemed chill about it, at least according to his doctors. “He has a really good attitude … even though his own wife and children were in shock,” one of them told the Thai media. “He’s been smiling and giving interviews all day from his bed.”
- Snake bites to the dick are the exception, not the rule. “This is all bizarre,” Danupol Tapo, a rescue worker who helped get Boonmakchuay to the hospital and the snake back into the wild, told CNN. “I had witnessed snakes [come] out of toilets many times, and when they bit [it] mostly would be at legs or butts. Not the penis; this is the first time.” Some supporting evidence to Tapo’s claim: Two weeks after the Boonmakchuay incident, a King Cobra leapt from another Thai toilet, but it went straight for 56-year-old Amporn Chaeng’s butt; his penis, at least per initial reports, remained untouched.
- Generally speaking, below-the-belt animal bites are more myth than fact. “In the United States animal bites account for 800,000 injuries yearly requiring medical attention and it is estimated that 1 of 2 Americans is bitten by an animal or person in their lifetime,” the Brazilian authors of the most comprehensive study on the topic wrote in The Journal of Urology in 2001. “Despite these rates genital trauma due to animal bite is rare.” So rare that the authors could only find 10 such bites over a 16-year period at their hospital. A similar study — this one focused on dog bites in developing countries — found just three more from January 1997 and July 2008.
- You’re probably thinking to yourself, But what about the candiru, that nasty Amazonian fish that swims up your urethra while you’re swimming and takes residence there until it either kills you or a doctor forcibly removes it by cutting off your penis? I saw it on Grey’s Anatomy and read about it in Fight Club and Naked Lunch. That isn’t just rare; it’s bullshit. European explorers stoked the fears of a Great Penis-Eating Fish starting in the 19th century, probably inspired by campfire tales told by locals who learned of it via one Amazon-River-long game of telephone. According to a BBC article that debunks the candiru penis-devouring myth, “As W.R. Allen, a renowned Amazonian ichthyologist, put it: ‘I was told of numerous cases of the candirus entering the urethra, but they were always some distance downstream, and when I arrived downstream I was told of many such cases upstream.’” At best, the medical literature supports one such case, while the BBC quoted Stephen Spotte, a marine scientist who attempted to verify recent tales of candiru cock-chomping (without much luck), as saying the odds were about the same as “being struck by lightning while simultaneously being eaten by a shark.”
- That’s not to say your penis can’t serve as fishing tackle. Case in point: This naked Russian angler who seemingly caught a grayling with his penis — for, it would appear, the amusement of his buddy Alexei, who happened to be filming the whole thing.
- Larry David most famously offered up his dick as an animal chew toy for an audience: Jeff and Susie Greene’s dog biting his penis while he was taking a leak at their house during a Season Four episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. (The dog allegedly gave Larry a boner, which is why Jeff theorized it went after Larry’s dick in the first place; true to Curb form, somehow all of this tied back to Larry’s role in the stage version of The Producers.)
- This teen Steve-O wannabe on YouTube also went to the dog-bites-nuts gag for laughs.
- The same for this YouTuber. But he used a dog bone as a stunt dick in order to cut down on any actual physical injury.
- It was a smart move. Because it’s all fun and games until an animal actually sinks its teeth into your penis, balls or any of the surrounding genital area. For instance, an Australian beachgoer needed 100 stitches to close a wound that stretched from the tip of his penis to its base after a Staffordshire bull terrier inadvertently bit him in the groin while going for a ball the man was hiding between his legs. And a Nigerian bank worker was left pissing into a pipe after a dog jumped him on his way to work. (Both the dog and its owner faced criminal charges—the dog for assault and the owner for negligence.)
- Still, these Australian and Nigerian men got off relatively unscathed — their penises mangled, but salvageable. More than a few of the documented animal penis bites end in amputation — either by the animal’s mouth or the doctor’s hand. Per a 2011 article in the journal ISRN Urology by six Moroccan urologists (warning: the link comes with photos that are both NSFW and nauseating), “A 38-year-old countryman, married and father of a young girl, with no past medical history was referred to our department for evaluation after an attack by his mule. At presentation, a complete amputation of the penis with a wide haematocele [translation — a bunch of blood gathered in the scrotum, but not the testicle] was noted.”
- In at least two cases, the amputation occurred in male infants — one was 5 months old (he was bitten by a dog, with no details as to how or why); another was 9 months old (he was mauled by a street dog). For both of them, once the wound was properly treated, doctors recommended “feminizing genitoplasty” (i.e., gender reassignment surgery). The parents of the 9-month-old refused — opting instead for “hormonal replacement and penile reconstruction at adolescence.” The parents of the 5-month-old waited before making a decision, but ultimately followed their doctors’ orders: “A year later, after psychological evaluation of the patient and family, he underwent a surgical procedure for genital feminization, which may potentially provide better cosmetic and functional results.”
- Dogs are the bulk of the dick-biters (the offending breeds include mastiffs, pit bulls, and rottweilers). But certain horses, hyenas, donkeys and alligators also have been known to bite at a dick — in addition to the python, grayling and mule mentioned above.
- A penis bee sting is supposedly somewhat painless, according to a Cornell University graduate student who studies bees — and therefore spends enough time around them that his balls are frequent targets for their stinger. “If you’re wearing shorts and doing bee work, a bee can get up there easily,” he says. “But I was really surprised that it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.”
- While a penis spider bite — especially if it’s from a female redback spider — isn’t so much about the pain as it is the venom that courses through your dick and the rest of your body afterward. “Common early symptoms are pain (which can become severe), sweating (always including local sweating at bite site), muscular weakness, nausea and vomiting,” the British tabloid The Mirror reported when such a spider sunk its fangs into an Australian construction worker’s penis. It also can kill you if an antivenom isn’t administered quickly enough.
- But why end on a downer? After all, there’s one kind of insect bite that might actually be good for you dick — that of the Brazilian Wandering Spider. “[An] erection is a side effect that everybody who gets stung by this spider will experience along with the pain and discomfort,” an expert in the spider presented to the American Physiological Society back in 2007. “We’re hoping eventually this will end up in the development of real drugs for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.” Maybe it’s nature’s way of giving back for some of the manhood it’s taken.
