strangulation method

[Sweetpickle]

You get lots of opinions here jim.
You should be able to find some guys here who started out
that way, then cut them off when they hurt badly.
If you do that the next step is a trip to the er.
Just plan to have sane sober help close by.

[Paolo]

Keep in mind, this may work for small animals like goats or sheep, but you're not an animal. You don't have as brittle of cords, or the immune system. And the animals aren't wearing clothes, either. They're outside in plenty of air. While it's fairly reliable, I do recall some cases of infection from many years past and a fatality.

Imagine your coworkers sitting there in the office wondering, what's that smell?!

[SplitDik]

This method hurts too much. I can take a LOT of pain, but after about four hours I just can't stand it anymore. At first it feels like nothing, but after about half an hour it begins. Then the pain moves right up into your abdomen.

The only reasons it works on animals is because they don't have hands to remove the band. It is actually cruel, and many animals will start rubbing their banded balls on stumps and fences because it bothers them so much. It is not painless.

[ghostautumn]

I can verify that this is excruciatingly painful. In my case the solution was to kill them gradually, and use the strongest possible lidocaine gel all over the area, including the abdomen. The first night I didn't tie them off completely, it was just too intolerably painful: I left them only half tied-off, so that they were purple but not entirely cut off from blood circulation. The next morning I went and got Tylenol 1s, and that allowed me to tie them off completely for about 12 hours, at which point they were whitening and completely numb - but NOT dead; I momentarily took off the bands and the blood rushed bringing PAIN along with it. I wasn't prepared to let them rot on my body, so I cut them off, but like a previous post said that requires a MANDATORY trip to E.R.

[SilverFox]

This is a bad idea.

I can speak to this method, having performed it on calves as a young man. Now, calves have a long ball sac that is easily constricted by the green cheerios used in an elastrator. Yes, the small rubber bands look like cherrios. Once they are slipped on it takes about a week for the dead tissue to fall off. It stinks. It smells really bad.

I hiked a very long trail about three years ago. After a few weeks a small skin flap on the inside of my leg became irritated and grew to the size of a pea. One of my trail friends, a doctor, suggested I use a piece of floss to tie a "ligature" on the pea sized irritation and let it just die off. I did and I covered it with a bandage and put plenty of antibiotic salve on it. After a week, it was obviously dead, but would not fall off. It smelled really bad. I finally cut it off. I decided then and there, this is not something I would want to do again, even for a skin flap.

[_g]

There are stories on BME. Yes it will fall off on it's own. But between it falling off and the start, it can be a H*%$ of a trip! And maybe deadly and/or costly.

You really need to read the experiences on BME before you act.

_g