Awarded PhD from the University of Melbourne for a thesis questioning how cultural manifestations of cannibalism challenge the assumed anthropocentrism of our relationships to other animals.
Police in Quebec report that convicted serial killer Robert Pickton is in a medically induced coma and on life support after being attacked by another inmate in prison.
The Canadian pig farmer was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with the maximum parole ineligibility period of 25 years in 2007. He was also charged with the murders of 21 other women, but those counts were stayed. In total, investigators found DNA from 33 women — many of them Indigenous sex workers who had vanished from Vancouver’s downtown eastside in the 1990s and early 2000s — at Pickton’s Port Coquitlam pig farm. Pickton also once allegedly bragged to an undercover police officer that he had killed as many as 49 women, and wanted one more to make an even 50.
Pickton allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with pork products he sold to his neighbours for their personal consumption. This puts him in the category of entrepreneurial cannibal, selling human products (directly or via porcine digestive tracts) to ‘innocent’ cannibals who bought his products; in the league of Sweeney Todd and Delores Roach.
Whether he fed human flesh to his pigs, his neighbours or himself, the revulsion and fascination in the media, which focussed on the possible cannibalism more than the torture and murder, sheds some light on the fragility of the thin red line between humans and (other) animals. The pigs had reportedly eaten humans and then been eaten by humans, with human meat incorporated into their flesh through digestion, plus possibly a more direct route to cannibalism via the sale of the meat, masquerading as pork. The headlines concentrated on the suffering of the dyspeptic neighbours who may have eaten (and probably enjoyed) the flesh, although it is obvious that their indigestion was far less painful than the torture endured by Pickton’s victims.
In February 2024, Alberta comedy group Danger Cats had their Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa performances cancelled after widespread backlash over T-shirts they made showing Pickton grinning and holding a slice of bacon with the caption “Pickton Farms, over 50 flavours of hookery smoked bacon.”
Sources told Radio-Canada on Tuesday that Pickton, 74, was clinging to life following what Correctional Service Canada (CSC) confirmed was a “major assault” on Sunday at the maximum-security Port-Cartier Institution, about 450 kilometres northeast of Quebec City. Pickton was in a segregated intervention unit at the maximum-security prison when he was speared in the head with a broken broom handle on Sunday evening, May 19, 2024.
Chief Marilyn Slett with the Heiltsuk Tribal Council in Bella Bella, B.C., said that discussion about Pickton’s assault has revived painful memories for the families of the victims and Indigenous people. Tammy Lynn Papin, the sister of one of Pickton’s victims, told CBC News that she felt relieved and happy when she heard that the serial killer had been attacked in prison.
“I said, ‘Good for him, he deserved it.’ I don’t wish any harm on anybody but — karma, you know?”
The movie The Farm may perhaps be based on the news reports about Robert Pickton. In the film, tourists are captured, caged, bred, slaughtered and sold as food. Which is what Pickton, the pig farmer, did to pigs for a living, and to humans for diversion. He ‘processed’ the captured women, in the same way that he ‘processed’ the pigs on his farm. Another movie called The Hermit is about to be released starring Lou Ferrigno (The Incredible Hulk) as a cannibalistic pig farmer, making human jerky for a living.
It’s what humans do to billions of farmed animals every year.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) summed this up with a billboard campaign in 2004 showing a young woman and a pig, with a caption saying, “Neither of us is meat”. Bruce Friedrich, director of PETA’s campaign, responded to the predictable outrage by observing that,
“Canadians who are shocked at the thought that they may have eaten human flesh should think about the fact that there appears not to be a difference in taste between pig flesh and human flesh. A corpse is a corpse, whether it formerly belonged to a pig, a cow, a chicken, or a human.”
The mastermind of a “grisly and gruesome” extreme body modification network who streamed mutilations on his “eunuch maker” website has been jailed for life, with a minimum term of 22 years.
Marius Gustavson, 46, was accused of being the “arch manipulator” of vulnerable victims and purportedly took part in at least 29 procedures, which were “little short of human butchery”, the Old Bailey in London heard.
The “large-scale, dangerous and extremely disturbing” four-year enterprise included castrations, the use of clamps to crush testicles, penis removals, the freezing of limbs and administering electric shocks to a 16-year-old boy, procedures which were streamed on Gustavson’s website.
The “busy and lucrative” business earned more than £300,000 from its global base of 22,841 paying subscribers between 2017 and 2021.
Gustavson, who had previously admitted charges including conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm, appeared for sentence via video link alongside six other men who had all admitted their involvement. The charges relate to thirteen victims who are under police guard.
Judge Mark Lucraft, the recorder of London and most senior judge at the Old Bailey, said as he announced the sentence:
“Gustavson, you are very much the mastermind behind this grisly and gruesome enterprise. The business you set up was one that was both busy and lucrative. As with all the others involved, you have no medical qualifications. The footage uploaded was extremely explicit and made available to paying subscribers no doubt so they could watch it for their sexual gratification […] Like-minded individuals were recruited by you, Gustavson, to assist in what became a large-scale, dangerous, and extremely disturbing enterprise.”
The prosecutor, Caroline Carberry KC, told the three-day sentencing hearing that there was “clear evidence” of cannibalism and that Gustavson, who had two previous fraud convictions in Norway, had “cooked testicles for lunch in an artfully arranged salad platter”. He also kept numerous body parts as “trophies” in a fridge at his home in Harringay, north London and offered to sell the severed penis of one of his victims for hundreds of pounds. Penisectomy, the removal of the penis and emasculation of the subject, is a popular topic in cannibalism texts, signifying the loss of the dominance of the virile carnivore, eaten by others who are closer to nature, more adventurous in their carnivory, and so more savage. Think of Lenzi’s film Cannibal Ferox, where we have not one but two penisectomies, one by the white invader and the other by the enraged natives.
The court heard the procedures were carried out in “amateur and dangerous” ways with kitchen knives, surgical scalpels and farm or slaughterhouse implements designed to be used on slave animals, leaving victims in agony and often needing medical attention.
The judge said, “They are permanent and irreversible procedures and will have a long-term, lifetime effect on the ability of the victim to carry out their day-to-day activities.”
Gustavson’s film-production techniques seemed to have become more professional as the number of procedures increased. The videos were uploaded to the website and subscribers were offered varying levels of membership from “free” to “VIP”, which cost £100, the court heard.
The scale of the operation run by Gustavson, a Norwegian national, and others was “without precedent”, Carberry said, adding that it was “impossible to know” the full scale of the offending.
The court previously heard that the procedures are linked to a subculture where men become “nullos”, short for nulloplasty or genital nullification, by having their penis and testicles removed. More details are available on the Queerdoc site.
In a video of one incident, which was played in court, one of the group’s victims was branded with the letters “EM”, for eunuch maker, on the back of his calf. The man later complained to police about Gustavson and his “circle of acolytes”, leading to the investigation and arrests in London, Scotland and South Wales. In his victim impact statement, the branded man described Gustavson as a “lunatic” running a “slick, professional website”.
The other six defendants admitted conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm. The judge ruled that “I am entirely satisfied that the motivation of all those involved were a mix of sexual gratification as well as financial reward.”
Gustavson pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit grievous bodily harm, five counts of grievous bodily harm with intent, making and distributing an indecent photograph of a child, and possession of criminal property.
Peter Wates, 67, of Purley, Surrey, a retired former member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Forensic officers found a scrotum and two penile shafts inside a tub of butter marked with the instruction “do not defrost” at his home address.
Janus Atkin, 38, of Newport, Gwent, who had been completing a veterinary course, was jailed for 12 years.
Ion Ciucur, 30, of Gretna, Scotland, received five years and eight months’ imprisonment, and Stefan Scharf, 61, of no fixed address, was sentenced to four and a half years in jail.
David Carruthers, 61, and Ashley Williams, 32, of Newport, Gwent, were jailed for 11 years and four years, six months respectively.
This was not just a business venture, but an expression of nullo ideology. In January, three men were sentenced after admitting causing grievous bodily harm to Gustavson.
Damien Byrnes, 36, from north London, was jailed for five years for removing Gustavson’s penis with a kitchen knife on video at his home on 18 February 2017. Jacob Crimi-Appleby, 23, from Epsom in Surrey, was jailed for three years and eight months for freezing Gustavson’s leg leading to the need for it to be amputated in February 2019. Nathan Arnold, 48, from South Kensington, west London, received a two-year suspended sentence for the partial removal of Gustavson’s nipple with a scalpel in the summer of 2019.
In mitigation, defence barrister Rashvinderjeet Panesar said the breakdown of Gustavson’s marriage was the “trigger” for his offending.
“He had a desire to be the architect of his own body. His modification led him to feelings of empowerment. It appears at face value to be something that’s become an addiction for him.”
Kate Mulholland, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said, “Whilst the victims in this case all seemingly consented to surgeries and amputations, the victim who bravely reported his assault to the police expressed serious regret regarding his procedure and the lasting impact it has had upon him. This clearly emphasises why such practices are unlawful.”
Detective Inspector Amanda Greig, from the Metropolitan Police’s specialist crime command, thanked the victims for their bravery, adding, “I would like to highlight the excellent work of the Met’s investigation team, who have examined thousands of hours of horrific material seized from the suspects. Their diligence and professionalism have ensured no one else will suffer at the hands of these men.”
The Met said a search of Gustavson’s flat had uncovered boxes of medical needles and syringes, local anaesthetic packs, surgical tools, a wooden chopping board and a mallet, a body board with leg and arm restraints attached, disposable skin staplers, and numerous medical procedure videos.
Body modifications are not unusual; we see men and women proudly displaying tattoos and piercings in public now, although within living memory they were considered only for sailors and members of criminal gangs. Nor is it new; from about 1550 CE to the late 19th century, young boys were castrated, often quite brutally, before puberty, simply to ensure that their voices would not deepen, and they would become “castrati”, with the lung capacity and muscular strength of an adult male, and the vocal range of a prepubescent boy. Before that, since pre-Biblical times, young boys (and in many places girls) have undergone genital mutilations as part of religious or cultural rituals.
News stories about cases like the Eunuch Maker tend to start with warnings to sensitive readers that they may find the details disturbing. But there is also an intriguing ethical question that is largely ignored in all the coverage.
When the issue of modification and mutilation is related to other species, it bizarrely becomes innocuous. Companion animals are usually desexed to ensure they remain docile. Farmed animals such as bulls and boars are routinely castrated when babies, usually without any anaesthetics, so that their taste is not affected by puberty, which gives the meat an unpleasant “taint”. Like most anthropocentric ethics, whatever we choose to do to “animals” is functional, advantageous (to humans only), and considered unremarkable and inculpable, while doing the same things to humans, even consenting ones, is considered (to quote the Judge) “grisly and gruesome”. The exact same baffling and discombobulating shift of perspective happens when portraying the difference between the eating of animal “meat” and human “flesh”. Gustavson ate the flesh of the human animals he castrated, the difference being they had asked for the operation. If one occurrence is repulsive, surely so is the other?
The website is no longer available, but this is what it looked like:
Dmitri Malyshev was recently released from a 25-year sentence for murder and cannibalism to fight on the Ukrainian front for the Russian “Storm V” and “Storm Z” forces.
The enormous number of casualties and shortage of Russian volunteer troops in Ukraine inspired Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin, to scour the worst prisons in Russia and recruit murderers, rapists and cannibals for his army, the Wagner Group. They were dropped into the thick of the fighting, and promised a full pardon if they survived six months against the Ukrainian army. Prigozhin has since been killed, but the scheme apparently survives, now run by the Russian military.
The latest recruit is Dmitri Malyshev. Originally from Volgograd, Malyshev was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2015 for multiple criminal offences. Ten years ago, he murdered an acquaintance, a Tajik native, and then filmed himself cutting the heart out of the victim and roasting it in a frying pan and eating it. Malyshev, part of an organized criminal group, had previously killed two businessmen for their money.
In the video, Malyshev said:
“We’re roasting a human. Here it is – a heart. I’ve already added the onion.”
Malyshev subsequently apologized for his actions, “carried out under the influence of alcohol.” Well, that’s OK then. Who hasn’t acted ill-advisedly after a few drinks and eaten a friend?
In March 2024, Malyshev took a photo in Ukraine with another participant in the war, Alexander Maslennikov from Volzhsky, who was convicted in 2017 for stabbing to death two girls he met at a karaoke joint, dismembering them, and hiding them in the forest, for which he received a 22-year sentence. In 2023, residents of Volgograd and Volzhsky expressed their fear on social media about Maslennikov’s potential return to the region.
A cannibal and a serial killer were released from prison and went to the front line
The cannibal Dmitry Malyshev, who ate Tajik’s heart and recorded the whole process on camera, was released from prison and went to war in Ukraine to "fight" sex education in school and gays. At… pic.twitter.com/R26pDYHAMh
During his conversation with V1 journalists, Malyshev confirmed that he had served his prison term alongside Maslennikov, and they both signed a military contract in October 2023. Malyshev was deployed to the ‘Storm V’ unit. The cannibal asserted that he had decided to “fight for the preservation of traditional Russian values.” He added that he came to Ukraine to “fight” against sex education in schools and gays.
Malyshev is currently in hospital. He told reporters:
“A grenade landed on me during an assault manoeuvre. I have a broken jaw, shrapnel in my knee and left hand and my left eardrum burst. Nothing to see here.”
Other cannibals purportedly sent to fight in Ukraine include:
Nikolai Ogolobyak, a Satanist who, with his followers, killed four college students and ate their internal organs in a ritual feast
Denis Gorin, who killed and ate parts of at least three victims, although parts of around twelve bodies were found
From Putin’s point of view, it’s an ideal solution. Why feed these guys (even if not very lavishly) for the next twenty years or so, when they can go off and be killed or else fend for themselves, finding their own sources of meat and onions? And, if they happen to survive the hellish battles in which they are dropped, then they are ‘pardoned’ and sent home where, more than likely, their victims’ relatives may have plans for them. From a military point of view, too, they have proved that the life of a human is worth no more to them than any other kind of edible animal, which, together with having nothing to lose, makes them ideal killing machines.
“…there is no article ‘cannibalism’ in the legislation of the Russian Federation. Perhaps that is why the dehumanization of Russians has already acquired a literal meaning.”
Meat the twenty-first century version of super-soldiers.
A 31-year-old man is in custody on suspicion of killing a man and eating parts of the victim’s face last weekend at East Charleston Boulevard and 3rd Street Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department released this report:
Police advised that the alleged perp, Colin Czech, had “biological matter in his hair, mouth, and on his clothing.” “Biological matter” is a euphemism for blood, flesh and other bodily substances.
Czech reportedly claimed the victim had attacked him. Police said the victim, identified as Kenneth Brown, was bleeding from head wounds and one of his eyes was missing. He was transported to the hospital, where a doctor pronounced him deceased.
During an interview, Czech allegedly said he was homeless and had been awake for several days because something was “possessing him.” Reports say Czech told detectives he “used his teeth to eat the victim’s eyeballs and ears.”
Police booked Czech into the Clark County Detention Center in absentia on a charge of open murder. Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson said it was one of the most unusual cases he has ever seen in more than 40 years as a defence attorney and prosecutor. He says the competency of the defendant will no doubt be addressed, adding “It is not uncommon for some of these cases to take years. Sometimes people never become competent.”
Czech was set to appear in court on Monday, April 29, but was hospitalised. In his eventual court appearance, he appeared dazed and uncomprehending.
Eating faces is not unknown in the annals of Cannibal Studies. In 2012, Rudy Eugene, “the Causeway Cannibal”, bit off the face off a homeless man in Miami, Florida before being shot to death by Miami police. In Wales in 2014, Matthew Williams lured a young woman back to his hotel room and began eating her face, apparently under the influence of amphetamines. Williams had been released from prison just two weeks before the killing and was described by police officers as “demonic”. Again in Florida in 2016, Austin Harrouff killed a couple he didn’t know and chewed off a victim’s face. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Why all the faces? There is not much flesh on a face, yet it is considered a delicacy in some cultures. In the movie Eye without a Face, the protagonist watches on a hacked computer camera as a woman prepares a Persian dish called kale pache, literally “head and hooves”. It’s usually from a sheep, but whose head is it this time? Is she a cannibal serial killer? No spoilers here – you’ll have to watch it to find out.
Meanwhile, back in California, the man this blog reported on a few weeks back who found a human leg on the street in Bakersfield and started chewing on it has been sentenced to one year in jail in a Kern County courtroom. With good behaviour (and eating all his veggies?) he could be out in a lot less than that.
Under the dominant ideology of anthropocentrism or “speciesism”, buying the head or leg of a sheep for consumption is considered perfectly legal, if a bit quirky (or repulsive to some), yet eating a human face is headline material. But is there really that huge a difference between two species of mammals?
If you read this blog, and I hope you do, you might remember a movie we reviewed recently called Wendigo. It was about the mythical creature from Algonquin legends, the spirit who takes over humans and turns them into voracious cannibals whose feeding frenzy makes them grow larger and, consequently, hungrier. The Wendigo is usually represented by the stag or at least the antlers of a stag; thus the title of this week’s film, Antlers, which fronts another Wendigo, although this time a rather less complex creature.
Directed and co-written by Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Black Mass) the film is produced by Guillermo del Toro, who has already won three Academy Awards for his imaginative grotesqueries. Del Toro’s films exhibit his fascination with fairy tales and mythology and the monstrous, in which he finds poetic beauty. The cast is outstanding, led by Keri Russell (Grimm Love, The Americans) as Julia, a teacher in rural Oregon who wants to help a young boy in her class named Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas) who, she suspects, is suffering parental abuse. She thinks this because he is drawing gruesome pictures of creatures with huge antlers, and collecting roadkill.
Jeffrey Dahmer’s dad used to take him out on road trips to find roadkill to dissect, but there was nothing wrong with him, was there? Well, OK, but anyway, he wasn’t being abused, and nor is Lucas (except by the usual school bully).
Lucas’ dad was using an abandoned mine to cook methamphetamine, disturbing the quiet of the place, releasing who knows what has been hiding in there? Yep, but it’s not a balrog (also usually shown with horns), it’s a wendigo. And it has infected both the dad and the little brother. Dad is now very loud, very violent creature with a lack of hair (bit like Gollum, but more excitable) who need to be fed raw meat every day. No smart cracks about Oregonians, please. But Julia is an outsider herself – she fled to California as a young woman to escape her abusive father, and is wracked with guilt about leaving her brother Paul (Jesse Plemons – Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad) behind. He is now sheriff of the town, where he does exciting things like evict poor people from their humble homes. She thinks he resents her, and we think so too – why wouldn’t he? He tells her he spent his entire life praying she’d come back. But now, whenever he comes near her, she flinches as she flashes back to her father abusing her as a child.
Paul goes into the woods to retrieve half a human body that someone has reported, and takes it to the coroner, who tells him the mutilation shows teeth marks – and they are human teeth. Almost halfway into the movie, and we finally have some cannibalism going on! Paul finds the other half of the dude (the dad’s former business partner) in the mine where they were cooking the meth. Also some mysterious antlers!
From there on, people start getting eaten – the stern school principal, the school bully who has been picking on Lucas (monsters can also be instruments of justice). It doesn’t work well for dad either; after he is finished enjoying the school principal, the real monster, now in the shape of a skeletal beast looking similar to the creature fought in the Alien films (but with antlers), sacrifices his body (the reference to the crucifixion is clear), then bursts out of his mouth, leaving him a charred, flayed wreck.
Lucas is carried off to the hospital, where he is diagnosed as dehydrated, malnourished, and deeply psychotic. Well, no wonder!
Warren, the previous Sheriff, is a local Native American, and explains to them that Lucas’ drawings, as well as the antler found in the mine, depicts the Wendigo,
“…a diabolical wickedness that devours mankind… known to be eternally starving but feasting makes them hungrier, and weaker. Those who are unfortunate enough to encounter one can only kill it when it’s in its weakened state. And only by extinguishing its beating heart, forcing it to search for another host. But it makes sense you see – our ancestral spirits never died. They were here long before we were here, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone. But now they’re angry.”
They find the missing school bully, who has been “eaten in half”, but Paul tells Julia he still cannot believe in a mythical nature spirit. He requires a conversion experience – maybe his deputy getting pin-cushioned and eaten, and then him getting comprehensively monstered? That leaves it up to Julia to take on the Wendigo. Being a teacher, she remembers the bit about it being weakened when eating, and the bit about extinguishing its beating heart. Using some impressive combat techniques that she probably learnt in The Americans, Julia rather easily beats the big beast, but then has a new problem – the Wendigo spirit is now in Aiden, Lucas’ little brother. Does Julia have the heart to kill and tear the beating heart out of an eight-year-old boy who looks like he just needs a meal and a bath? And do it while she is being watched by his big brother, Lucas?
Spoiler alert: you bet she does!
But as we watch the happy ending, Lucas now living with Julia and Paul, we see Paul begin to cough and spit out black foam – the first symptom of becoming a Wendigo (or this version of it.) As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen told us in his “Seven Theses” on monster culture, the monster never really dies or goes away; it just comes back in different clothes, or different skin. No matter how many times Ripley killed the Alien, it kept coming back, sometimes in the shape of its progeny (a reversal of the Beowulf story, where killing the monster arouses his mother’s wrath).
There are several versions of the Wendigo story. In Supernatural, the Wendigo only ate people every 23 years, an extreme version of the paleo diet. In Fear Itself, the Wendigo takes over anyone who is weak and hungry and fills them with rage, while in Lone Ranger, it appeared an outlaw in the Old West, who could only be killed with a silver bullet for some reason. The common thread is insatiable and voracious appetite, a hunger that destroys without thought for sustainability. In Bones and All, that hunger begins young and gets stronger as they grow older. Perhaps the classic of Wendigo literature is the film Ravenous, in which becoming a Wendigo gives not just superhuman strength but close to invulnerability, or at least the ability to heal any wounds by eating more people. And, of course, a voracious hunger.
The film starts with a warning. This is read in Ojibwe, one of the Indigenous languages of the Algonquin people, whose lands stretch from present-day Ontario in eastern Canada all the way into Montana. This is the language in which the mythology of the Wendigo was developed. The English translation scrolls up the screen:
The film is brilliantly acted, beautifully filmed and directed, but could have made more of a point of the environmental message with which it started, rather than just hurtling into the special effects and gore. The Wendigo is well presented, if a little sparse (we hardly see those antlers), but the connection between the greed of humans and the monstrous revenge of nature is left hanging. There have been five great extinction events found in fossil records. The SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION is happening as we speak. Extinctions have occurred at over 1,000 times the background extinction rate since 1900, and the rate is increasing, a result of human activity (or ecocide), driven by population growth and overconsumption of the earth’s natural resources. In late 2021, WWF Germany suggested that over a million species could go extinct within a decade in the “largest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaur age.”
Humanity has waged war on nature since we came down from the proverbial trees, but particularly since the agricultural revolution some 12,000 years ago, when we decided nature could be dominated rather than placated. Fossil fuel combustion, the selective breeding of billions of other animals for food or clothing, the capture of wild animals for entertainment – these are all manifestations of the war on nature, motivated by a Wendigo-like hunger which can never be satiated. It’s a war that we cannot win, without destroying ourselves in the process – nature never goes away, but, like the Wendigo, comes back in another (angrier) skin – floods, droughts, climate change, etc. We have, as the Ojibwe warning says, pillaged the land and awakened a Malevolent Spirit. Like any organism evolving by natural selection, we can adapt or die. Our only advantage over other species is that we could, if we had the sense, decide which to choose.
Raising eyebrows is a national sport of the USA during election years, and both Trump and Biden, the contenders, have done their share of the heavy lifting. But Biden really hit his eyebrow-raising stride this week (on April 18 2024) with claims that his uncle, second lieutenant Ambrose Finnegan (known in the family as Bosie), was shot down in the Pacific in 1944, and may have ended up on the dinner menu of Papua New Guineans.
Visiting a missing-in-action war memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden put his hand on the engraved name of Ambrose Finnegan, whose plane went down but whose body was never recovered. Biden said,
“He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
Biden’s cannibalism story, told twice during his visit to Pennsylvania, was clearly intended as a gesture of respect for those who died in the war, and a dig at Trump. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated that Biden’s story presented a contrast with Donald Trump, who reportedly described Americans who died in war as “losers” and “suckers” after refusing to attend the American cemetery in rainy Paris in 2018. Trump also mocked George H.W. Bush who was shot down in 1944 and John McCain who was captured and tortured in Vietnam, claiming real heroes did not get shot down or captured. Trump denies it all, but the Paris story was later confirmed by John Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff.
However, like a lot of off-the-cuff comments, this one may have backfired for Joe Biden. Cannibalism is a convenient excuse for vilifying others, but vilifying Pacific Islanders does not help make any points against Donald Trump, and instead proved a distraction.
Certainly, cannibalism has been reported in Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Pacific nation that occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, off the northern coast of Australia, but not always by the locals. At least 100 cases have been documented in which Japanese soldiers killed and ate the flesh of Allied troops, Asian labourers and indigenous people in Papua New Guinea during WWII. Researcher Toshiyuki Tanaka, an associate professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, reports,
“These documents clearly show that this cannibalism was done by a whole group of Japanese soldiers, and in some cases they were not even starving.”
Cannibalism can be an affirmation of victory, a way of humiliating an enemy beyond death. Historian Gerald Linderman reports that Japanese soldiers would disembowel captured Americans and leave the bodies “with their severed genitals stuffed in their mouths,” not only symbolically gagging the mouth of the victim but declaring him both sterile (castrated) and edible in one metaphorical gesture of contempt. George H.W. Bush, later to be President of the US, was shot down during bombing raids on Chichijima, a tiny island 700 miles (1,100 km) south of Tokyo, in September 1944. Eight of the airmen with him were captured, tortured and executed, and Japanese officers then ate parts of the bodies of four of the men. Bush was the only one to evade capture.
While the Japanese army may have practised cannibalism in PNG for political and psychological ends, those (relatively rare) tribes of local peoples who did so almost certainly were motivated by ritual, reverential reasons. The memory of ancestors is maintained in some cultures by ceremonially eating their flesh. Some tribes have even cashed in on the cannibal mystique, ushering awestruck tourists around monuments to their supposed recent cannibal past.
Local commentators have not been amused by Biden’s colonialist characterisation of their citizens as primitive savages who routinely eat outsiders, a trope that has proved useful throughout the history of imperial conquest as a pretext for invasion, enslavement and extermination. Michael Kabuni, a lecturer in political science at the University of Papua New Guinea, said that the comments were unsubstantiated and poorly judged, particularly when the US has been seeking to strengthen its ties with the country, and counter Chinese influence in the Pacific region.
“The Melanesian group of people, who Papua New Guinea is part of, are a very proud people. And they would find this kind of categorisation very offensive. Not because someone says ‘oh there used to be cannibalism in PNG’ – yes, we know that, that’s a fact. But taking it out of context, and implying that your [uncle] jumps out of the plane and somehow we think it’s a good meal is unacceptable. There was context. They wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”
Biden is right to say that there were some cannibal tribes in PNG last century, but wrong to universalise it as something routine and simply gustatory. His anecdote may have been inspired by the infamous tale of Michael Rockefeller, the 23-year-old Harvard graduate and son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who vanished in western New Guinea in 1961 while on a trip to collect wooden carvings of the Asmat people for a museum. His boat capsized on the way, and he was reported to have swum towards the shore. His disappearance captivated the world’s media, and later led a researcher to claim in a book that Rockefeller made it to shore and was eaten during a ritual by the Asmat. It became fashionable to set cannibal movies in the jungles of PNG, even if they were not actually filmed there.
There is one more aspect of the history of PNG cannibalism that adds insult to injury. One of the most commonly cited examples of modern cannibalism, often used as a reason to avoid the practice, references kuru, the fatal, neurodegenerative disease discovered in PNG and caused by “misfolding and aggregation of a host-encoded cellular prion protein” and purportedly transmitted by cannibalism. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies became best known during the outbreak of “mad cow disease” caused by human-imposed bovine cannibalism, in which cows were fed bone meal from other cows. It occurs also in sheep as “scrapie” and in humans as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, one form of which, kuru, literally the “trembling” disease, peaked among the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s. It became famous, not least for showing that cannibalism is not something lost in the mists of history – it even won a mention on The Love Boat! The disease mainly affected women and children, who were allegedly the main consumers of brain tissue during funerary rites. Instances of the disease fell off sharply when cannibalism was prohibited by Western administrators, which led to the hypothesis that kuru was a result of the ingestion of human brains and central nervous systems.
But even if cannibalism and kuru are directly related, it seems a stretch to make this a primary reason for avoiding cannibalism. Mad cow disease was far more widespread than kuru, and yet did not significantly affect the sales of bovine flesh in the long term. Nor, as far as I am aware, have any cannibals reported a preference for central nervous system tissue. Nor would they be likely to catch it from white men that fell from the sky.
Wendigo is a film written, directed and edited by Larry Fessenden, who would, a few years later, make an episode of the TV horror series Fear Itselfcalled SKIN AND BONES, which was about a guy who disappears on a hunting trip with friends and returns cold, thin and desperately hungry. He has, we quickly discover, become a Wendigo! In this, the earlier film, there are also crazy hunters led by Otis (John Speredakos), who are mad with our protagonists for driving into a stag (the traditional symbol of the Wendigo) who they have been tracking and, worst of all, breaking his antlers, which are apparently very valuable. The Wendigo is already there in their cabin as a “dark presence”, so we just need to be introduced.
First, the really good cast – George (the Dad) is played by Jake Weber, from the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and Meet Joe Black. He is a super-stressed New York photographer, and the last thing he needs is a run-in with a bunch of redneck hunters. Kim, the Mom, is played by the wonderful Patricia Clarkson (most recently starring in Gray) and the kid, Miles, is played by Erik Per Sullivan, who was Dewey in Malcolm in the Middle.
George is more disturbed by the rednecks than he is willing to let on, telling Kim, who is a psychologist, that he is distressed by the “abyss” between him and them, with no possibility of communication. She tells him that:
“It’s very archetypical for the civilised man to feel threatened by the man of the country.”
George is utterly divorced from nature, seeing it as alien and menacing. So, the other last thing he needs to meet is a Wendigo, a figure on the front line of the human war on nature.
They head into town to buy curry (as you do in small towns) and Miles meets in the store a Native American Elder who tells him about the Wendigo, a small carving of which Miles is drawn to.
“The Wendigo is a mighty powerful spirit… it can take on many forms, part wind, part tree, part man, part beast. Shape shifting between them… It can fly at you, like a sudden storm, without warning, and consume you with its ferocious appetite. The Wendigo is hungry, always hungry. The more it eats, the bigger it gets, and the bigger it gets, the hungrier it gets, and we are hopeless in the face of it. We are consumed, devoured…. There are spirits that are angry. Nobody believes in spirits anymore. Doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
The Wendigo is a figure from the mythology of the Algonquin people of North America. They lived in a land of long winters where the competition for food would have been intense and cannibalism of the dead probably not unusual. Myths help to spell out behaviours that societies need to discourage – cannibalism could decimate small, isolated communities. That myth, of the voracious monster whose hunger only grows with feeding, was later applied to the invaders, the colonists who took their land, their produce and often their lives. In such a struggle, the Wendigo, as an original figure of their culture, could take almost a vengeful role, eating the technologically superior invaders. George inadvertently confirms this, telling Miles “the Wendigo only goes after bad guys.”
The Elder tells Miles he can keep the figure, but there is no sign of him when Kim is subsequently asked to pay for it. He is presumably one of those spirits, not angry but advisory. He warns Miles about the “cry of the Wendigo”. The Wendigo is clearly (to the audience) imbued into that carving.
Then the Wendigo strikes. Or is it the rednecks? Did the Wendigo knock George off his sled, or did it carry him home after Otis shot him? Was it the revenge of nature, or society? When the Wendigo later demands of Otis “Give me my liver!” it voices the cry of revenge of every animal, human and otherwise, killed for fun or profit. When Otis meets justice, Miles awakes with his Wendigo figure in his hand.
It’s a great cast, with an absorbing plot, although it gets a bit lost at the end. But the questions it asks are compelling. The New York Times critic wrote:
“Mr. Fessenden carefully blurs the line between psychology and the supernatural, suggesting that each is strongly implicated in the other. The rampaging Wendigo may be a manifestation of Miles’s incipient Oedipal rage, but at the same time it is a force embedded in nature and history.”
The Wendigo carries so much symbolism, besides the horror trope in which he seems so regularly to find himself, such as in Fear Itself or the classic Wendigo film, Ravenous, which was made a couple of years before this film. He expresses the anger that rages within George, the father who cannot show interest in his son’s curiosity because of his own issues brought with him from the city, frustration and fear of failure. And we can infer (as the NYT does) that Miles himself feels an Oedipal rage toward his father who, Freud tells us, is the child’s rival for sexual possession of the mother throughout childhood. The voracious hunger comes from an even earlier stage, what Freud called the “cannibalistic stage” of babyhood, where the infant wants to own the breast, consume it so it will always remain in his possession. George’s playacting the cannibal, attacking and pretending to eat Miles, is a common parent/child game, but is also deeply revealing of these forces hidden deep in the unconscious.
At yet another level, the Wendigo represents the revenge of nature on the civilised, those whose insatiable hunger for growth decimates the land and finds sport in killing its inhabitants, be they human, deer or any ‘other’. The antler is a weapon used by the stag, a normally shy and timorous animal who becomes a formidable fighter in the mating season, and the size and strength of its antlers represents both its sexual and fighting prowess. In the hybrid shape of a human and a stag, the Wendigo recasts humans from hunters to hunted, from predator to prey. This is precisely why Hannibal Lecter is shown in Wendigo form throughout much of the three seasons of the television series Hannibal. Hannibal is the civilised, rational, erudite man of science, a psychiatrist who knows of the dark forces inside the human psyche, and has determined that the human is just another animal, no more deserving of respect or inedibility than any other species, and even less if he happens to be rude. Who judges that – the supernatural force, the inhuman, the less-than-human or, in Hannibal’s opinion, the more-than-human? Whichever you choose, it appears as the Wendigo.
Mike Tyson, sometimes called “The Baddest Man on the Planet”, is nonetheless regarded as one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. He was the world heavyweight champion from 1987 to 1990. After a spell in prison from 1992-95 for raping a young woman, Tyson made a comeback, and briefly held the championship again in 1996.
In 1997, Tyson fought Evander Holyfield at the Las Vegas MGM Grand Garden Arena in a fight that grossed $100 million. Tyson famously bit off a piece of Holyfield’s ear, which was later found on the floor of the ring. When he subsequently bit Holyfield’s other ear, he was disqualified, the first time in over fifty years a heavyweight fight had ended in disqualification. Tyson’s boxing licence was revoked by the Nevada State Athletic Commission and he was fined $3 million. Tyson claimed he was angry because Holyfield had been headbutting him without suffering any penalties for that.
In an interview with Fox News in 2013, Tyson was asked about his history, his fights, his religion, and becoming a vegan, a claim he had made on the Ellen DeGeneres show. He admitted to eating chicken occasionally, but said he never ate red meat.
“None at all, no way! I would be very sick if I ate red meat. That’s probably why I was so crazy before.”
Now, we are forced to admit that Tyson cannot really be called a cannibal since he did not swallow the piece of Holyfield’s ear. But he did make that significant connection between eating meat of other animals and biting (and almost eating) human meat. Had he been a vegan in 1997, he probably would not have aimed for that ear, unless it was an ear of corn.
The notoriety of that fight night has followed Tyson ever since, and now he is making money from it. He has created a cannabis company called Tyson 2.0 and is selling edibles in the shape of nibbled ears. Flavours include black eye berry, sour apple punch and watermelon (none of the products claim to taste like Evander Holyfield). The edibles are available from the company’s online store and have been sighted in dispensaries in New York. His website calls it “undisputed hemp.” No pun is out of bounds in the worlds of hemp or cannibalism.
In March 2024, Tyson announced he will be fighting YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul in a bout that will be shown live on Netflix later this year. No doubt many people will be watching his teeth as closely as his gloves.
A man was arrested on Friday March 22 in Kern County (north of Los Angeles in the San Joaquin Valley) and charged with the “removal of human remains from other than a cemetary” (sic) according to the Sheriff’s office.
Construction workers in Wasco reported seeing the man near the Amtrak station.
“I’m not sure from where, but he walked this way and he was waving a person’s leg. And he started chewing on it over there, he was biting it and he was hitting it against the wall and everything.”
It seems a pedestrian (unidentified so far, some reports say male, others female) was killed by a train on Friday morning near 7th and G streets in Wasco. According to eyewitnesses, a man was subsequently seen eating a human leg that had been torn off in the accident.
The video shows the man in a red hoodie and black pants bending over something. He turns around and laughs at the person taking the video and then walks away. Shortly afterwards, the video shows the police responding and the man waving the leg at the officers.
A voice can be heard on the video saying, “He’s eating that shit!” in English and then in Spanish. Most of the news reports edit out the parts where it looks like he might be eating the leg.
Other news footage from KERO-TV showed what appeared to be bloodstains on the sidewalk at the scene of the incident. Some reports say he was charged with mutilating the body, supporting claims that he had consumed some of the limb.
The sheriff’s office later confirmed that they had arrested the man and identified him as 27-year-old Resendo Tellez. He was charged with six offences including possession of controlled substance paraphernalia.
Social media commentary varied from reflecting on drugs, homelessness and poverty to accusations of demonic possession and culture war accusations against California liberals allowing a “breakdown of societal norms”. One headline stated, “Cannibals Are Alive and Well in Newsom’s California.”
JUST IN: California man arrested for allegedly eating a severed leg that he took from a pedestrian who was struck by a train.
The incident happened in Wasco, California.
According to police, 27-year-old Resendo Tellez removed a leg from an Amtrak Station.
News footage of the story often contains warnings of “distressing material” and in most cases blur the leg when showing the video. Is there something weird about all this shock and horror?
If the same person had not been hit by a train, it would have been perfectly normal to show that person’s leg in a program on, say, beach holidays. On a porn site, the leg would have been the least of what we might have seen. Yet once detached from the torso, a human limb becomes so abject it must be blurred, and even then, warnings issued. The reason seems to be that we are terrified to admit our animality. We can go to a supermarket and push a trolley around containing the leg of a cow or a lamb, with the overt understanding that we will be eating it later, just as Tellez allegedly did with what he identified as a piece of meat lying on the ground. Yet because it is a human body part, it becomes obscene, repulsive, horrifying, because it reminds us that we, too, are mortal, edible animals, made of meat.
Way back in 2015, when first campaigning for the presidency, Donald Trump announced he would build a wall on the border with Mexico to keep out:
“…people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
That seems quite tame now, doesn’t it? Warning about rapists have lost their power, especially given Trump’s own personal legal struggles regarding sexual assault.
So he has turned, dear reader, to our fave subject. Speaking on Right Side Broadcasting Network from Mar-a-Lago, a resort that relies heavily on immigrant labour, he upped the ante on border crossers by calling them cannibals released from mental institutions.
“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know insane asylums. That’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”
This is not the first time that Trump has quoted Hannibal. At a rally in Iowa in October 3023, he also spoke of people from insane asylums sneaking into the country, and again quoted Hannibal. He added a rather strange endorsement.
Trump on Hannibal Lecter: You know why I like him? Because he said on television “I love Donald Trump” so I love him pic.twitter.com/1jYyXKFkjI
“Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television on one of the – ‘I love Donald Trump.’ So I love him. I love him. I love him. He said that a long time ago and once he said that he was in my camp, I was in his camp. I don’t care if he was the worst actor, I’d say he was great to me.”
Hannibal Lecter is, of course, not in a position to comment on politics as he is a fictional character born in the mind and the novels of Thomas Harris and born again, we might say, in the films of those books in which Hannibal was played by Brian Cox and then by Anthony Hopkins. Then, in a third coming, Hannibal was rebooted as a Gen-X queer icon in the TV series Hannibal, played by Mads Mikkelsen.
Which of these Hannibals loves, or loved, Donald Trump?
Mads Mikkelsen told CBS News in 2016 that though he could “definitely laugh at some of the stuff [Trump] says, he can also go, ‘Oh my God, did he say that?’ I think he’s a fresh wind for some people.”
Hopkins, who was born in Wales and became a U.S. citizen in 2000, told The Guardian that he doesn’t care for Trump and explained that he doesn’t vote anyway, because he doesn’t “trust anyone.”
“We’ve never got it right, human beings. We are all a mess, and we’re very early in our evolution.”
Nietzsche wrote of an Übermensch, a super-man who was as superior to ordinary people as they feel themselves to be to pigs. Hannibal clearly sees himself in this role. The mantra of the Übermensch is “Adapt, evolve, become”. But, as Charles Darwin would tell you (if he had not himself become extinct), evolution does not describe a ‘great chain of being’, an evolutionary ladder toward perfection. It is simply about best fitting a niche, surviving a hostile environment while competitors become extinct. The art of evolution is to out-run, out-fight, out-eat the other – to be the last one standing. And the only one eating. Perhaps eating the loser. As Frederick Chilton tells us, “Cannibalism is an act of dominance.”
Early humans seem to have practised cannibalism (according to some palaeontologists), although it may have been more for ritual purposes than for the protein. But in the modern age, protein is king, or at least those who eat the most protein consider themselves therefore superior to nature, and to other humans. Meat is a fetish, an addiction, a way of declaring human, particularly male, supremacy. We confine, torment and slaughter around 80 billion land animals each year (that’s 80,000,000,000) to feed this fetish.
But supremacism does not depend on species – those of another race, another origin, another gender, another age-group may all be dehumanised, objectified like farmed animals, and cannibalism is famously the accusation used to dehumanise colonised people, giving invaders the excuse to enslave or exterminate them. Trump dehumanises immigrants by accusations of cannibalism, just as his political opponents dehumanise him. When American comedian Jon Stewart was asked in 2017 by Late Show host Stephen Colbert to say something nice about then President Donald Trump, he hesitated and eventually blurted, “He’s not a cannibal”. Colbert followed this up a year later suggesting Trump eats human flesh, but only “it’s very well done with some ketchup”.
Consuming the appropriated assets of those considered foreign or inferior is standard operating procedure in human history. In the absence of now largely abandoned concepts of (some) humans being semi-divine creatures, created in the “image of God”, what is to stop the actual consumption of those on the next rung down? As the huge population of humanity consumes the environment, leading to climate change and famine, could cannibalism be the next phase of human evolution?
As anthropologist Harold Monroe asks in Cannibal Holocaust, “I wonder who the real cannibals are?”
The Cannibal Guy 