Cannibalism In Animals

Irina Shlionskaya

Cannibalism is considered by most of us to be a pathology that is incompatible with the human community. Meanwhile, experts assure that eating animals of their own species is ubiquitous in nature. Psychology teachers from the University of Lancaster (Britain) Jared Piazza and Neil McLatchy have published an article on it in The Conversation website. According to British experts, cannibalism occurs in many species. So, gulls and pelicans eat their chicks, tadpoles eat smaller and frail counterparts in order to get stronger and faster. In praying mantises, the female devours the male after mating.

Cannibalism is quite common among mammals. For example, in rodents - rats or hamsters - the female can eat her offspring if they are weak or too many to feed. Lions and bears sometimes eat their cubs to make their mothers available for mating. Several times there were cases of cannibalism among chimpanzees, when the latter kidnapped and ate other people's cubs.

There is much evidence that our distant ancestors also had a tradition of cannibalism. Primitive tribes (perhaps not all) ate human flesh. Usually it was the meat of sick and weak people, children, or killed and captured enemies. Sometimes there was simply no other food, and sometimes there were magical rituals behind this: for example, the belief that by eating the meat of a person, you will acquire its qualities.

However, as civilisation developed, people developed an aversion to eating the meat of their own kind. This is a taboo that is often not dared to break even under the threat of starvation. 

So, in 1972, a plane crashed in the Andes. Some of its passengers died. Part was saved. They did not have any food, but they decided to eat the meat of the dead only when they reached the last stage of exhaustion. One of these survivors, Roberto Canessa said that it seemed to him and his comrades that by eating the meat of these people, they were stealing their souls, as it were.

All this, of course, is connected with civilisational ideas. Religion teaches that humans have souls and animals do not. Therefore, we calmly eat the meat of cows or pigs, but eating human flesh seems to us savagery. Meanwhile, for a number of tribes, this is part of the rituals. So, in the Fore tribe (Papua New Guinea), it is customary to eat the flesh of deceased loved ones so that it does not get to grave worms.

Piazza and McLatchy once asked their students to consider a hypothetical situation: there is a society in which a person can bequeath to eat his flesh after death, preparing it so that it is safe to eat. This is part of the burial traditions. Nevertheless, some students still considered such actions unacceptable. And yet scientists believe that if necessary, people could easily adapt to eating their own kind. For example, if they were faced with the question of survival.

Even among civilised Europeans, episodes of cannibalism are not so rare. This is usually associated either with mental illness, or with some kind of criminal and extreme situations. For example, if prisoners flee from taiga camps, they can take "canned food" with them - comrades of lower status, so that when hunger strikes, they can be killed and eaten. People were killed for the purpose of eating their meat for food during the famine in the Volga region, in besieged Leningrad, and today this information has already become public knowledge.

-- Pravda.ru