\u201cIf children wet themselves, they might be shocked with an electric cattle prod.\u201d That\u2019s the way the sentence from an unpublished manuscript reads. It was written in 2021, more than 40 years after the deaths in Jonestown, in a description of living conditions inside Jonestown. It is stated as a fact, without qualification or sourcing.<\/p>\n
But it is a myth.<\/p>\n
The earliest appearances of this rumor \u2013 all unattributed \u2013 include the following:<\/p>\n
The Brinton article was the first in a long list of references to the use of cattle prods in Peoples Temple, most of them, like Brinton, referring to each other, and all of them unattributed. They include the 1995 edition of the book Snapping<\/a><\/em>, by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (using the language of Kilduff and Javers); the 1999 book, Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness<\/em><\/a>, by Jim Keith; an article accompanying a 2019 podcast on Jonestown from Roll Call<\/a> (citing the Customs report); and an Encyclopedia.com entry on Jonestown<\/a> (also quoting Kilduff & Javers). Articles which appear on this site include those by Kristian Klippenstein<\/a> and Rose Wunrow<\/a>. <\/p>\n The fact is, there were no allegations of the use of cattle prods in the history of Peoples Temple from those who had been in the group. No defectors alleged it. The charge does not appear in the New West<\/em><\/a> article which Kilduff and Phil Tracy wrote in 1977 \u2013 long after the Temple’s Redwood Valley days \u2013 nor does it appear in \u201cThe Accusation of Human Rights Violations\u201d<\/a> made by the Concerned Relatives in April 1978. Even in the hyperventilated atmosphere of the tragedy\u2019s aftermath, no survivors, former members or relatives leveled the charge.<\/p>\n But perhaps the most telling refutation of the assertion is that no cattle prods were recovered from the carnage of the Jonestown site following the deaths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIf children wet themselves, they might be shocked with an electric cattle prod.\u201d That\u2019s the way the sentence from an unpublished manuscript reads. It was written in 2021, more than 40 years after the deaths in Jonestown, in a description of living conditions inside Jonestown. It is stated as a fact, without qualification or sourcing. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":35361,"menu_order":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-121241","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121241"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135423,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/121241\/revisions\/135423"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/35361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}