The Satare-Mawe people of the Amazon region of Brazil have an excruciating initiation ceremony for their boys. When a boy is on the threshold of manhood he must wear on his hand a glove woven with drugged bullet ants in it for ten minutes. And he must do this for twenty times over the course of a few months. After the glove is removed from the boy's hand, he will start writhing in pain and lose control of his limbs for a while. In the words of Steve Backshall, a television reporter who underwent the rite once, “If there'd been a machete to hand, I'd have chopped off my arms to escape the pain.”
