It’s a question that never seems to grow old.

If Donald Duck (who vaguely resembles a duck) eats a chicken’s body parts, such as wings, does that make him a cannibal? You know, because he’s a (sort of) bird eating body parts of birds.

Donald appeared this week on the YouTube interview show HOT ONES (see link above). Hot Ones calls itself:

The show with hot questions, and even hotter wings.

It’s a talk show produced by First We Feast and Complex Media and hosted by the very congenial host Sean Evans. The simple but ingenious premise is that Evans interviews celebrities while they eat a platter of spicy chicken wings. To make it interesting, the wings are served with increasingly hot chilli sauces. The questions become deeper and more personal as the Scoville hotness score of the sauces is ramped up and the guest becomes hot and bothered.

The Scoville score on Donald’s last sauce, “Straight out of Hades”, is 1,454,000, which has the expected result on poor Donald.

So anyway, would eating chicken wings be classified as cannibalism for young Mr Duck (who, we are told, is actually celebrating his 90^th anniversary of his animated life)? Well, I covered the biological question pretty comprehensively in my blog last Christmas, which looked at the ethics of Donald and family eating chickens and turkeys for their festive meal.  

The traditional definition of cannibalism is eating the flesh of a member of one’s own species. Now, it is not clear what species of duck Donald purports to be, but to be a cannibal, he would have to be eating a duck that wears clothes and speaks (sort of) English (the Hot Ones interview helpfully offers subtitles). This would probably limit his cannibalism feasting options to his nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, or Uncle Scrooge, and all of those people remain alive and uneaten, as far as we are aware. Or, of course, his long-time paramour Daisy, and he tells us that she is still around; indeed, she was the one who challenged him to agree to the interview while they were watching earlier episodes.

Now if we’re going to say that Donald eating any bird (Class: Aves) is cannibalism, then we need to agree that humans eating cows, pigs, sheep, goats, etc (Class: Mammalia) would also be cannibalism. I’m happy to go with that, but I haven’t found too many other takers.

But there is one more obstacle to the outrage of those condemning Donald’s consumption of chicken wings. Sean Evans states very clearly at the start of the feast

I notice you have the cauliflower wings on that side of the table, but no water or milk to help you out?

Donald doesn’t need them (he claims). What a rebel! That’s why we love Donald, far more than we love Mickey, at least, according to the totally unscientific surveys I have performed.

Donald doesn’t want chicken meat, or cow’s milk. Donald is a vegan! I guess in a world where humans eat twelve million ducks (and 200 million chickens) every day, we shouldn’t expect anything else.