Gerbilling , also known as gerbil stuffing or gerbil shooting , is an urban legend description of a fictitious sexual practice of inserting small live animals usually gerbils but also mice , hamsters , rats and various other rodents into one's rectum to obtain stimulation.
Some variations of reports suggest that the rodent be covered in a psychoactive substance such as heroin prior to being inserted. There is no evidence that the practice has ever occurred in real life, and its existence remains highly dubious, as all rodents have long nails and teeth for digging or burrowing and naturally try to burrow out of any small spaces.
According to folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand , fictitious accounts of gerbilling were first recorded in and initially were said to involve a mouse and an unidentified man. In subsequent versions of the story, the animal was a gerbil and the story applied to several male celebrities. As of the mids, there were no reports in peer-reviewed medical literature describing gerbilling among the variety of rectal foreign objects removed from people's bodies.
Mike Walker, a National Enquirer gossip columnist, spent months attempting to verify the gerbilling rumors about a celebrity. After much investigation, he was unable to find any evidence that a gerbilling incident ever happened: "I'm convinced that it's nothing more than an urban legend. Dan Savage , a sex-advice columnist who frequently discusses unusual sexual practices, stated in that he has never received a first-hand or even a second-hand account of the practice.
According to the editors of Snopes. M Jenny Edwards, an attorney who specialises in "sexual offenses relating to bestiality, zoophilia and zoosexuality", connects the folkloric practise of 'gerbiling' to formicophilia. She defines this as "a form of bestiality, which essentially deals with things crawling on your or in you". However, she acknowledges that she hasn't "personally dealt with a gerbil case, nor read about them". A February episode of Family Feud featured a woman who immediately answered "a gerbil" when host Steve Harvey asked "Name something a doctor would pull out of a person.
