What do you think about it? I find nothing wrong with the thought of cannibalism just as long as the bodies are acquired in accordance with whatever laws may be in place. And I am quite curious to what we taste like.
You bring up a good point, Steevo, but keep in mind that we humans are defining the morality. If the animals had a say in it I feel confident that they would be vehemently opposed to being eaten. I think most of the idea of humans being important just comes from the fact that we're humans and see ourselves as important.
i agree with carlie, there are EXTREME situations when it may be the only option, but personally, i don't think i could get my head around it and I'd probably die of starvation :/
Hve you ever read the story of the whaleboat Nantucket. They had to eat their dead for survival, which is acceptable. But one lifeboat drew lots to kill someone and eat them. That is not acceptable.
Screw the notions of what society sees as acceptable. If you have the option of everyone starving to death while waiting for someone to die inorder to eat them, or the choice of everyone agreeing to draw lots seeing who would sacrifice themselves inorder to save the others...What would you do?
The same thing goes for if somone in a group of people in the same situation was criticaly injured and could not survive much longer...and the others are starving. Would it be wrong to kill the good-as-dead man to save the others now, or waste resources on him thus making the probability for them all to live drop drasticaly?
Oh, and I bet we taste a lot like beef.
I think I had some spelling errors, but I just woke up. So I do not care.
in the famed book Animal Farm by George Orwell (awesome book!), i was enlightened of something i have never thought of. As Old Major is inspiring the other animals before his life is up, he preaches."Man is the only enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and over work is abolished forever. Man is the only creature that consumes [food] without producing [food]" Just something to ponder on. . .
Man produces food by farming - both animals and vegetables. That is really how civilizations began - when people learned how to create the food that they needed. Animals don't produce food at all. They eat each other and we eat them, but that the food chain, right?
If other animals count as producing food because we eat them, then people produce food too. Only we decompose and get eaten by bacteria and other things instead of getting eaten by other animals. But it's all the same, really.
One thing not brought up yet is that mad-cow disease spread and became an epidemic because cows were forced to eat parts of other cows. Might something similar happen to us if we ate other humans?
Entire tribes have been wiped out because of this exact thing. It's really the brains that you're not supposed to eat. There were several tribes in Northern Alaska (near the Barrows) that were wiped out because they believed that by eating the brains of dead elders, they would absorb their knowledge. Instead, they only absorbed very aggressive bacteria. The rest of the body, however, seems just fine as demonstrated by cannibalistic activities that have been continuous for very long periods of time by indigenous tribes - and still continues today.
Although I am not learned in this specific field, I can take a shot at the answer.
The brain must be a loverly place for bacteria to live. A lot of nice fatty tissue and blood, great fluid cushions to live in and next to no annoying neighbors! It is more or less the gated community of the body.
