North Korean Soldiers Using Ants as Food Tasters to Guard Against Supposedly Poisoned South Korean Care Packages

Flickr user OliBac

​We all know that North Korea's leadership is batshit loco, which has unfortunately left a populace that's hungry when not outright starving. It's almost impossible for South Koreans to send care packages to their brothers and sisters in the Hermit Kingdom--and even if they do, they must now deal with the latest propaganda offered by Kim Jong Il.
South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper is reporting that North Korean soldiers, upon finding said care packages are "digging the ground a little bit, putting the food there, and waiting to see whether ants congregate around the food or not."

It's not as farfetched a preventative measure as it may seem: studies have shown ant colonies can determine if food will kill them off pretty quick. But that the North Koreans (acting on orders of the government) even think those packages may be attacks upon the state instead of humanitarian gestures shows how complete Jong Il has brainwashed his troops. The same thing happened in the early 1990s, with the North Korean regime telling its captives that those care packages were poisoned--until the starving population ate them out of desperation and found out they weren't. "The regime then changed the story," the Chosun Ilbo dispatch disclosed, "saying food from South Korea does not kill immediately but slowly, by inducing continuous vomiting and diarrhea." And when that didn't stop the populace from eating them? Any soldier caught with a package were "taken to concentration camps or shot."

Such a threat isn't stopping soldiers this time around: said ant-tested care packages are showing up on the North Korea black market.

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