Bullwhip Punishment

Bullwhip Punishment
The cat o’ nine tails is a type of multi-tailed whip. Unlike many other whips, it’s was chiefly intended for use on humans and not to facilitate the handling of livestock or other animals.
The cat o’ nine tails has for instance been used to meter out physical punishments in the Royal Navy and Army of the United Kingdom, and for judicial punishments in the United Kingdom and many other parts of the British Empire.
In colloquial speech, the cat ‘o nine tails was often referred to simply as “the cat”. The term cat has also been used for other similar whips, e.g. whips with six tails.
It’s called a Cat o’ Nine Tails (Cat of Nine Tails) because the whip has nine “tails”. It should also be noted that the whip can inflict parallel wounds, just like the claws of a cat’s paw.
The earliest usage of the term that we know of is from 1695, but the design itself is considerably odler.
A Cat o’ Nine Tails is not made from cat tails.
A Cat o’ Nine Tails is usually made by unravelling a rope into three smaller ropes, and then unravelling each of them, to give you a total of nine tails. The tails are then knotted.
Many different designs have existed throughout history, but approximately 75 cm is a very common length for a cat o’ nine tails. A commonly used material is cotton rope.
Within the (British) Royal Navy, the Cat ‘o Nine Tails was commonly referred to as The Cat or The Captain’s Daughter. Formal floggings were ordered either by the ship’s captain or by court martial. Such floggings with the cat were carried out on deck in front of the rest of the crew.
The standard naval cat weighed about 13 ounces (370 grams). It consisted of a handle connected to nine thinner pieces of line. Along its lenght, each individual line was knotted several times. In films, we often get to see the Naval cat cut through the skin, but in reality it was much more likely to abrade the skin.
During the era of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Navy used a cat o’ nine tails where the handle was made of rope and covered in red baize cloth. The tails, which where around 2 feet long, were made of cord. A new cat was made for each flogging and kept in a red baize bag until it was time to use it. The person responsible for making the cat would be a bosun’s mate (bosun = boatswain, the senior most rate of deck department). A bosun’s mate (or several) would also be responsible for carrying out the lashing.
A lighter version of the whip was used summary punishment of Royal Navy boys. It was known as the Reduced Cat, Boy’s Cat, Boy’s Pussy or just Pussy. Instead of having nine tails, it had only six, and it was made form smooth whip cord.
If a boy was convicted by a court martial instead of being punished by order of the captain, the nine-tailed full-sized adult whip would be used instead of the Reduced Cat.
On training ships where most of the crew were boys, cats weren’t used at all. Instead, the boys had their bare bottoms birched.
The British Army employed a whip similar to the one used by the Navy, but much lighter in construction. The army whip consisted of strings attached to a drumstick, and the person responsible for carrying out the flogging was usually a drummer.
Compared to the naval cat, the army cat weighed less, the falls (tresses) were just 1/8th of an inch and the string used to make the cat was codline, a dense material similar to tarred string. A flogging with the army cat was much more likely to cut the skin than a flogging with the naval cat, since the army cat’s strings were thinner and denser.
Around 1870, the British Army stopped using floggings with the cat ‘o nine tails as punishment.
In early colonial Australia, the cat o’ nine tails was used for floggings in the penal colonies.
Reports from Norfolk Island mentions a cat o’ nine tails made from nine leather thongs instead of cotton rope. Also, this fearsome cat o’ nine tails had a led weight attached to each tail to make the injuries even worse.
In Canada, use of the cat o’ nine tails as corporal punishment was abolished in 1881.
In 1951, the UK prisons for male inmates were ordered to use only officially approved cat o’ nine tails from the national stock kept at Wandsworth prison. At Wandsworth, the whips were thoroughly tested before being sent out to other prisons throughout the UK.
Some former British colonies in the Caribbean have kept or reinstated flogging with the cat as a form of judicial corporal punishment.
Trinidad & Tobago never banned the use of the cat. The Corporal Punishment Act of 1953 stipulated that flogging was allowed if the convicted was male and over the age of 16. In the year 2000, the age limited was increased to 18 years.
Antigua and Barbuda reinstated flogging with the cat in 1990. Bahamas followed in suit the year after, but that law was short lived. Barbados reinstated flogging with the cat in 1993, but this law was soon declared unconstitutional by the Barbados Supreme Court.

The cat o’ nine tails is a type of multi-tailed whip. Unlike many other whips, it’s was chiefly intended for use on humans and not to facilitate the handling of livestock or other animals.
The cat o’ nine tails has for instance been used to meter out physical punishments in the Royal Navy and Army of the United Kingdom, and for judicial punishments in the United Kingdom and many other parts of the British Empire.
In colloquial speech, the cat ‘o nine tails was often referred to simply as “the cat”. The term cat has also been used for other similar whips, e.g. whips with six tails.
It’s called a Cat o’ Nine Tails (Cat of Nine Tails) because the whip has nine “tails”. It should also be noted that the whip can inflict parallel wounds, just like the claws of a cat’s paw.
The earliest usage of the term that we know of is from 1695, but the design itself is considerably odler.
A Cat o’ Nine Tails is not made from cat tails.
A Cat o’ Nine Tails is usually made by unravelling a rope into three smaller ropes, and then unravelling each of them, to give you a total of nine tails. The tails are then knotted.
Many different designs have existed throughout history, but approximately 75 cm is a very common length for a cat o’ nine tails. A commonly used material is cotton rope.
Within the (British) Royal Navy, the Cat ‘o Nine Tails was commonly referred to as The Cat or The Captain’s Daughter. Formal floggings were ordered either by the ship’s captain or by court martial. Such floggings with the cat were carried out on deck in front of the rest of the crew.
The standard naval cat weighed about 13 ounces (370 grams). It consisted of a handle connected to nine thinner pieces of line. Along its lenght, each individual line was knotted several times. In films, we often get to see the Naval cat cut through the skin, but in reality it was much more likely to abrade the skin.
During the era of the Napoleonic Wars, the British Navy used a cat o’ nine tails where the handle was made of rope and covered in red baize cloth. The tails, which where around 2 feet long, were made of cord. A new cat was made for each flogging and kept in a red baize bag until it was time to use it. The person responsible for making the cat would be a bosun’s mate (bosun = boatswain, the senior most rate of deck department). A bosun’s mate (or several) would also be responsible for carrying out the lashing.
A lighter version of the whip was used summary punishment of Royal Navy boys. It was known as the Reduced Cat, Boy’s Cat, Boy’s Pussy or just Pussy. Instead of having nine tails, it had only six, and it was made form smooth whip cord.
If a boy was convicted by a court martial instead of being punished by order of the captain, the nine-tailed full-sized adult whip would be used instead of the Reduced Cat.
On training ships where most of the crew were boys, cats weren’t used at all. Instead, the boys had their bare bottoms birched.
The British Army employed a whip similar to the one used by the Navy, but much lighter in construction. The army whip consisted of strings attached to a drumstick, and the person responsible for carrying out the flogging was usually a drummer.
Compared to the naval cat, the army cat weighed less, the falls (tresses) were just 1/8th of an inch and the string used to make the cat was codline, a dense material similar to tarred string. A flogging with the army cat was much more likely to cut the skin than a flogging with the naval cat, since the army cat’s strings were thinner and denser.
Around 1870, the British Army stopped using floggings with the cat ‘o nine tails as punishment.
In early colonial Australia, the cat o’ nine tails was used for floggings in the penal colonies.
Reports from Norfolk Island mentions a cat o’ nine tails made from nine leather thongs instead of cotton rope. Also, this fearsome cat o’ nine tails had a led weight attached to each tail to make the injuries even worse.
In Canada, use of the cat o’ nine tails as corporal punishment was abolished in 1881.
In 1951, the UK prisons for male inmates were ordered to use only officially approved cat o’ nine tails from the national stock kept at Wandsworth prison. At Wandsworth, the whips were thoroughly tested before being sent out to other prisons throughout the UK.
Some former British colonies in the Caribbean have kept or reinstated flogging with the cat as a form of judicial corporal punishment.
Trinidad & Tobago never banned the use of the cat. The Corporal Punishment Act of 1953 stipulated that flogging was allowed if the convicted was male and over the age of 16. In the year 2000, the age limited was increased to 18 years.
Antigua and Barbuda reinstated flogging with the cat in 1990. Bahamas followed in suit the year after, but that law was short lived. Barbados reinstated flogging with the cat in 1993, but this law was soon declared unconstitutional by the Barbados Supreme Court.

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Nathan Reiff has been writing expert articles and news about financial topics such as investing and trading, cryptocurrency, ETFs, and alternative investments on Investopedia since 2016.

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The bullwhip effect refers to the amplification of variability in demand as you move up the supply chain from retailers to manufacturers. When a retailer incorrectly forecasts demand, this mistake is often magnified as orders are sent to distributors and manufacturers, eventually leading to massive discrepancies between inventory produced and demand. Bullwhip effects can lead to excess inventory, lost revenue, and overinvestment in production.

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Value-added tax (VAT) is collected on a product at every stage of the supply chain where value is added to it, from production to point of sale.

Make to stock (MTS) is a traditional production strategy, used by manufacturers, that attempts to tailor inventory with consumer demand forecasts.

Wholesaling is distributing goods in bulk to a retailer for repackaging and resale in smaller quantities and at a higher price.

Fragmentation is the use of various suppliers and manufacturers to produce a good. It can also refer to market, industry, and business fragmentation.

Disequilibrium is a situation where internal and/or external forces prevent market equilibrium from being reached or cause the market to fall out of balance.

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The bullwhip effect refers to a scenario in which small changes in demand at the retail end of supply chain become amplified when moving up the supply chain from the retail end to the manufacturing end. 1

This happens when a retailer changes how much of a good it orders from wholesalers based on a small change in real or predicted demand for that good. Due to not having full information on the demand shift, the wholesaler will increase its orders from the manufacturer by an even larger extent, and the manufacturer, being even more removed will change its production by a still larger amount.

The term is derived from a scientific concept in which movements of a whip become similarly amplified from the origin (the hand cracking the whip) to the endpoint (the tail of the whip).

The danger of the bullwhip effect is that it amplifies inefficiencies in a supply chain as each step up the supply chain estimates demand more and more incorrectly. This can lead to excessive investment in inventory , lost revenue, declines in customer service, delayed schedules, and even layoffs or bankruptcies. 2

The bullwhip effect typically travels from the retail level up the supply chain to the manufacturing level. If a retailer uses immediate sales data to anticipate a strong increase in demand for a product, the retailer will pass a request for additional product to its distributor. The distributor, in turn, will communicate this request up to the maker of the product. 3 This alone is an aspect of supply chain operations and is not necessarily reflective of a bullwhip effect.

The bullwhip effect generally distorts this process by one of two ways. First, is when the original order change by retailers is due to an inaccurate demand forecast. The size of this error tends be grow as it progresses further up the supply chain to the manufacturer. The second is when a retailer has correct information about demand, but it leads to incorrect conclusions about information as to the reason and details of the retailer's order change are lost, leading to incorrect assessments by wholesalers, which are then magnified further up the chain.

For instance, imagine a retailer selling hot chocolate that typically sells 100 cups a day in the winter. On a particularly cold day in that area, that retailer sells 120 cups instead. Mistaking the immediate increase in sales for a broader trend, the retailer requests ingredients for 150 cups from the distributor. The distributor sees the increase and expands its purchase order with the manufacturer to anticipate increased requests from other retailers as well. The manufacturer increases its manufacturing run in anticipation of greater product requests in the future.

At each stage above, demand forecasts have been increasingly distorted. If the retailer sees a return to normal hot chocolate sales when the weather returns to normal, it will suddenly find itself with more supplies than needed. The distributor and manufacturer will have even more excess inventory.

Another reason for the lack of information is that larger logistics operations at the wholesale level take longer to change, meaning that the conditions that caused a change in demand at the retail level may have passed by the time a wholesaler has reacted. As changing manufacturing output takes longer still, and information from retailers is even more delayed in getting to manufacturers, the difficulty of reacting correctly to changes in demand increases even more so.

Even if the retailer had accurately assessed demand, for example, due to the start of a local hot chocolate festival, the bullwhip effect can still occur. The distributor, not being fully aware of local conditions, may assume this is due to a broad increase in the demand for hot chocolate, rather than specific conditions for that retailer. The manufacturer, being even more removed from the situation, would be even less likely to understand and correctly react to the change in demand.

Asset manager and famed "Big Short" investor Michael Burry made headlines in June 2022 when he warned investors about the bullwhip effect for big-box retailers and others. 3

In the example above, the manufacturer may be stuck with a significant surplus of product. This can lead to disruptions to the supply chain and to that manufacturer's business—increased costs associated with storage, transportation, and spoilage, losses of revenue, delays to shipments, and more. The distributor and the retailer in this example may also see similar problems.

A bullwhip effect indicates that a small error in assessing consumer demand has been amplified through a supply chain. This means communication between firms in a supply chain is imperfect leading to firms up the supply chain missing important information.
The bullwhip effect can be difficult to identify in real time, in part because it is caused by lack of communication throughout a supply chain. Frequently, it is a phenomenon that is observed after the fact, when inefficiencies have already been created.
There are many things firms in a supply chain can do to prevent, or at least reduce the likelihood and severity, of a bullwhip effect. First and foremost they can ensure clear and consistent communications between companies up and down the supply chain. This will help avoid temporary or localized shifts in supply from being misinterpreted as broader than they are. Firms can also make sure to take a wider viewpoint when making forecasts for demand, to reduce the effect of any temporary or limited shifts. Finally, companies can work to increase the speed at which they are able to respond to shifts in demand, meaning that they can readjust more easily if they incorrectly assess demand. This also reduces the need to overproduce or overorder to have a buffer in case of demand shifts. 1

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