Cannibalism is defined by our good friends at Wikipedia as:
“the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food.”
Most dictionaries like to put “human” in there somewhere, but that is just another manifestation of anthropocentrism, a species-wide narcissism that believes everything is just about us. The same ideology also insists that human flesh is somehow different to that of other animals, and human suffering somehow more intense, or at least more important.
Now, we know that corn cobs cannot grow arms and legs and barbecue each other or indeed anyone of another species. As far as we know, they also cannot suffer, as pain is an evolutionary response to danger, and only useful to animals, who can seek to avoid that danger. The concept of corn cobs tormenting and killing other vegetables is absurd.
But that is exactly what humans do, confining, tormenting and slaughtering some eighty billion sentient land animals every year, and several trillion sea animals. We draw the line, usually at other humans, sometimes at dogs and cats in Ohio, but that line is arbitrary and can shift without much impetus.
If corn cobs could eat each other, they probably would. The objectification of the other, human or nonhuman, and the intensity of the slaughterhouse we have built in this world, sees that line between carnivore and cannibal increasingly porous, as we have seen in the hundreds of examples in this blog.
“…as long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin . . . all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice’. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, foreword to ‘Vegetarianism, a Way of Life’, by Dudley Giehl
The Cannibal Guy 