cannibals

It’s not just humans who practice cannibalism: birds, certain flies, our close cousins the chimpanzees, and even bacteria eat their own kind. Intelligent species, like humans, may eat each other for psychological or religious reasons. Chimps seem to do it in a fit of revenge or just plain nastiness, as when females eat other mothers’ babies. Lions do it to preserve their genetic line?when a male takes over a pride, he eats the previous king’s cubs. Praying mantises do it as part of good sex: At the end of the sex act, the female bites the head off her mate and eats him.
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Sinafasi Makelo, of the Mbuti pygmies, has asked the UN to stop government and rebel fighters in the Democratic Republic of Congo from eating them. He says, “In living memory, we have seen cruelty, massacres, and genocide, but we have never seen human beings hunted down as though they were game animals. Pygmies are being pursued in the forests. People have been eaten. This is nothing more, nothing less, than a crime against humanity.”

More than 600,000 pygmies are believed to live in the Congo?s jungles. Both sides in the current civil war regard them as “subhuman” and also believe that those who eat them gain magical powers. UN human rights activists say rebels have cooked and eaten at least a dozen pygmies.
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You may be a vegetarian, but your ancestors not only ate meat, they occasionally ate each other. Cannibalism was common among our prehistoric ancestors, according to a new study of the Fore, an isolated tribe living in Papua New Guinea. Researchers Simon Mead and John Collinge found DNA evidence that a gene variant protected some of the Fore against a deadly prion disease related to Mad Cow Disease, that’s transmitted by cannibalism. The Fore used to practice cannibalism, but don’t anymore. Next they found that this protective gene variant is present in people all over the world, leading them to conclude that it evolved when cannibalism was widespread, in order to give protection from prion diseases.read more

Bryan Robinson writes for abcnews.com asking why someone would not only kill, but eat his victims. Experts say a killer’s need to dominate his victim may be the motivation behind modern cannibalism. Devouring a victim goes a step beyond taking their life and represents the ultimate conquest and sign of domination to a killer.

“It goes back to the old days of the warrior, where they would defeat their enemy and eat the part they most admired, like their brain or their heart,” says George Palermo, forensic psychiatrist at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, who worked on the Jeffrey Dahmer case. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘I really killed you. The only way you exist is in me.'”
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