Experimenting With Hogties
Don’t worry, it was for science:
30 volunteers, 15 men and 15 women, … allowed themselves to be “hog-tied” and then have heavy, lead-shot-filled canvas bags thumped on their backs.
The hogtying study was aimed at investigating whether employing the “prone maximal restraint position,” as law enforcement types refer to it, may cause asphyxiation. Hogtying someone, for any of our readers who haven’t been arrested lately, involves placing an individual, as the study puts it, “prone with his/her wrists secured behind the back, ankles bound together, and wrists and ankles tied together using handcuffs, cords, chains, or hobble devices.”
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, not a lot of research has been done on the health effects of hogties. Enter the 30 volunteers, who after being tested for healthy hearts and non-drug use, enjoyed at least two bouts of being hogtied and having varying amounts of weight placed on their backs to simulate a policeman’s boot.
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But wait, there’s more. To partly simulate the joy of being a captured criminal, the volunteers were strapped to a sealed breathing mask, hogtied and yelled at for one minute as they attempted with “maximal struggle” to escape the bindings.
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Perhaps the most surprising thing about the study was only two volunteers bailed “because they were psychologically unable to tolerate restraint.”
All kidding aside, this sounds like a serious study in a very good cause, as is clear if you read the whole article instead of just reading my excerpted “good bits”. But (kidding again) who knew science was so much fun?
Finally, wasted government money may result in something good, like a movie version of the experiment!!
I can hardly wait for the final report, which will probably tell the police to quit using this method of restraint because too many of the subjects had too much fun.
A dirty job, but someone had to do it …