Tag: Livestock

IDAHO amends its anti-cannibalism bill – cannibalism news, March 2024

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal News1 Comment

Idaho lawmakers have voted to expand a law that bans cannibalism because of fears about the popularity of human composting. Rep. Heather Scott introduced a bill in February 2024 to expand the state’s cannibalism ban and told a legislative committee that she’s worried about the possibility that people are eating other people.

Scott said:

“This is going to be normalized at some point, the way our society’s going and the direction we’re going.”

People are often surprised to hear that Idaho is the only state in the USA to have outlawed cannibalism. Other states have laws which target abuse or desecration of a corpse, making cannibalism legally impractical and problematic. Idaho introduced its law during the frenzy called the “Satanic Panic” last century.

The US is not unique in this – most countries do not have specific laws banning cannibalism. Germany didn’t, until Armin Meiwes ate his new social media friend.

The new bill, 522, adds to Idaho’s existing prohibition of cannibalism a ban on giving someone else “the flesh or blood of a human being” without that person’s “knowledge or consent.” Scott said she is “disturbed” by the practice of human composting, which is legal in several states as an option for disposing of the dead that is more sustainable than other burial methods and reduces a funeral’s carbon footprint. Human composting involves decomposing human remains like other organic matter and turning it into soil that can be returned to the family or used to make land more fertile. But Scott said outlawing composting would require overhauling rules for morticians, and so instead she focused on banning the act of deliberately giving human flesh to another person.

“I didn’t want to see that in my Home Depot stores.”

Scott said she was on a plane and watched a clip from a TV show displaying a chef feeding human flesh in sausage to contestants, which inspired her to take action. The clip, which she sent to the Idaho Statesman, is from a TruTV prank show, in which they pretend to feed people flesh. “They didn’t tell the people, they fed it to them,” Scott told the Statesman, though she noted it may have been a spoof.

Scott also submitted a link to a video featuring a Chinese official denying that his country had sold canned human flesh to people in Zambia. The canning claim was a hoax, spread with fake photos of butchery, according to news reports from 2016. Scott additionally pointed to a North Idaho man who pleaded guilty to murder last year and was initially also charged with cannibalism after investigators found postmortem mutilation and a bloodied bowl at the crime scene. The cannibalism charge was later dropped, meaning that the Idaho anti-cannibalism laws have still not been tried in court.

An editorial in the Idaho Statesman concluded:

But that’s where we are in Idaho: Unhinged, unreal legislators can bring forth just about any crazy idea and get a bill printed.

But imagining that humans might unwittingly eat other humans is not so far-fetched. Mythology is full of innocent cannibals—Agave eating her son Penteus, Thyestes eating his sons at his brother’s feast, Tereus eating Itys. Becoming “innocent” cannibals make us squirm, writes Donald Tuzin, because it denies us the escape of declaring the cannibal a maniac or monster—anyone can become a cannibal. In the movie The Farm, humans are treated as “living meat” exactly the way cattle are regarded on factory farms—the men are slaughtered for meat, the women bred and their infants pitilessly killed in front of the mother (as often happens in the dairy industry) so the farmers can sell the mothers’ milk. The final commodities are sold to innocent cannibals, who occasionally ring up, horrified to find residues such as a human tooth in their meat. Inverting the agricultural business plan, the “livestock” are human, while the farmers are dressed in animal masks.

But it doesn’t only happen in fiction. The Farm may be based on the Canadian pig farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton who confessed to 49 murders in the 1990s, and allegedly “processed” the meat of his rape and murder victims by feeding them to his pigs and, police said, possibly mixing them up with the pork products he sold to neighbours.

Joe Metheny claimed to have killed 13 people in the Baltimore area in the 1990s and turned them into burgers. He reported:

“Over the next couple weeks on the weekends I opened up a little open-pit beef stand. I had real roast beef and pork sandwiches and why not they were very good. The human body tastes very similar to pork. If you mix it together no one can tell the difference.”

In 2007, two men in England were arrested for the murder of a 14-year-old girl, with the prosecution claiming that her body had been cut up and minced into kebabs in a Blackpool takeaway called “Funny Boys”.

On April 9, 2012, police in Garanhuns, Brazil, arrested for murder Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira, his wife, Isabel Pires, and his mistress, Bruna Cristina Oliveira, who all lived together in a group they called “The Cartel”.

Residing with the Cartel was a small child named Vitória, who had been the daughter of their first victim. The child’s mother was a seventeen-year-old homeless woman whom the Cartel had invited into their home in Olinda in May 2008. She had been murdered by the Cartel, who then dismembered and skinned her body, storing the meat in their refrigerator before seasoning it with salt and cumin, grilling and eating it. The woman’s daughter was fed some of her mother’s flesh.

The worldwide public interest in the crimes did not stem from their murder of three young mothers, but from the fact that the Cartel had baked the victims’ flesh into salgados, salty, deep-fried pastries, which they then sold to the unsuspecting public. To the disappointment of the media, the pictures of the perpetrators showed them as three ordinary Brazilians, not the monsters the public had expected.

Back to Idaho, where Rep Heather Scott’s bill 522 sailed through the House and is heading to the Senate. She quoted in support of her bill from a recent article in The New Scientist which reviewed the human history of cannibalism (they concluded that it happened a lot) and stated:

“Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry? Our aversion has been explained in various ways. Perhaps it is down to the fact that, in Western religious traditions, bodies are seen as the seat of the soul and have a whiff of the sacred. Or maybe it is culturally ingrained, with roots in early modern colonialism, when racist stereotypes of the cannibal were concocted to justify subjugation.”

We don’t have to buy mulch to end up cannibals. Any sausage or burger might have human flesh in it, and no one would know the difference. We are animals, large mammals, made of red meat like cows, pigs and sheep. Unless you think we have some sort of supernatural dissimilarity from other animals, the thin red line between different species can only be identified as a cultural construct.

Mark Haydon, who was involved in Snowtown murders, being released from jail. SNOWTOWN (Justin Kurzel, 2011)

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SNOWTOWN is back in the news at the moment, due to one of the perpetrators being granted parole after serving his 25-year sentence. Mark Haydon was convicted of assisting John Bunting and Robert Wagner in the murders of 11 people, including his wife, between 1992 and 1999.

Haydon reportedly rented the abandoned state bank building at Snowtown in which the bodies were stored in barrels of acid.  A jury deadlocked on the charge that he was involved in the murders of his own wife, Elizabeth Haydon, and of Troy Youde, and he was never retried. His 25-year sentence was completed this year, and he will be freed into the community with no restrictions in May 2024 (unless the government succeeds in attempts to change the law to broaden the definition of a “high-risk offender”).

Above: the real Mark Haydon – then and now.

Relatives of the victims have long voiced their anguish and fear at any prospect of any of the perpetrators being released.

The film Snowtown is a recreation of this case, the most famous serial killer case in Australia (with the exception of the attempted genocide of the Indigenous population). A total of twelve victims were identified, and eight of the bodies were eventually found by police in barrels filled with acid, which were stored in an abandoned bank vault in the small town of Snowtown, in South Australia.

Although the press called this the “bodies in barrels” murders, it soon became known, to the sorrow of that little town, as THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS, even though only one of the murders had taken place there, the rest happening in the big city, Adelaide, between 1992 and 1999.

The final murder that took place in Snowtown, however, involved CANNIBALISM. We’ll have a look at that in this blog, although unfortunately the film doesn’t.

The film is a true Crime retelling, which means that none of the names have been changed to protect – anyone, and of course the dialogue has to be imagined to some extent. But we know a lot of what went on, and so did the film makers.

True Crime has been a popular genre for centuries, and transgressed the line between fiction and non-fiction in 1965, when Truman Capote released In Cold Blood, a “non-fiction novel”, relating or interpreting a 1959 Kansas murder. Modern versions of the genre extend beyond literature to films, podcasts, vodcasts and television shows. They tend to concentrate on the most sensationalistic cases and are grittily and brutally realistic in portraying the violence and gore.

In Australia, where this film originates, a survey found that some 44 percent of podcast listeners had listened to true crime podcasts, with an considerable proportion of them being women.

The protagonist of the film is Jamie Vlassakis, a teenager living with his single mother and two siblings. The mother’s boyfriend is a helpful sort of bloke who makes the kids dinner when mum has to go out, then strips them and takes photos of them for his own gratification. The mother deals quite effectively with this, beating him up and kicking him repeatedly, but soon a new man comes into their lives – John Bunting.

Bunting has a winning smile and a certitude that gets him into the family, and he takes Jamie under his wing. John also has a burning hatred of gay men and paedophiles, two rather different beasts whom he conflates into one evil figure. When Jamie tells him that he was raped by his older half-brother Troy, John tells Jamie he needs to “grow a pair” and take revenge. He involves Jamie in his plans to identify, capture and kill a range of people he considers monsters. He collects detailed information on a “spider wall” in his house. “Rock spider” is Australian slang for a paedophile.

But John Bunting has clearly not read Nietzsche:

He starts by involving Jamie in his plans to drive the erring boyfriend out of town. Jamie finds him in the garden, chopping up and mincing kangaroo body parts to toss onto the neighbour’s front door and sofa.

He involves Jamie in a raucous discussion of paedophile teachers, asking him what he thinks should be done with them. Jamie follows the fatal logic.

John takes Jamie under his wing, teaching him to ride a bike, shaving his head, showing him the spider wall, giving him a gun, and getting him to shoot John’s dog, a brutal blooding. When he introduces Jamie to the act of killing humans, there is also the accompanying deception: each victim is made to record a message that will be played on the answering phone of their loved ones. Jamie’s mum hears Troy say he hates her, and Jamie lies to her, letting her believe that forced call was true. Jamie goes off to doctors and government offices to collect payments, posing as the people they have killed. He doesn’t look happy about it, but he is sinking deeper and deeper into John’s machinations. After a while, collecting the government support payments becomes the motive as in the murder of Gary O’Dwyer; the vigilante pretext is forgotten. O’Dwyer invites the men to his place to watch him feed rats to his python, a process we see in slow motion in which the snake unhinges his jaw to swallow the prey whole, just as the men become unhinged in their growing lust to kill.

So John makes a man of Jamie, in the most toxic sense. He teaches him carnivorous virility – in order to be a man, you have to kill and eat. Not always the same carcass, but that does seem the logical consequence of the objectification of all victims.

The film traces the increasingly violent actions in which Jamie becomes involved, unwillingly at first, but totally under the control of John. He is made to watch them torture his half-brother Troy, who was earlier shown sodomising Jamie, and he finally steps in to finish the killing, tears rolling down his face, while John strokes his cheek and murmurs “good boy.”

Jamie is now a fully-fledged killer and a vigilante, not just an observer and helper the way Mark Haydon (the man currently being released on bail) is portrayed. Mark is a minor character, buying rubbish bags and digging holes for corpses, until near the end of the film, when he tells John he got into a fight with his wife, who called him a pussy. He told her what a big man he was – burying bodies. John brushes the story off, but we know she is next.

Although this murder is not shown in the film, evidence was given that Haydon saw his wife’s body and laughed. Her body was one of the ones found in barrels in the Snowtown bank building.

The final murder was Jamie’s half-brother (through a different father) David Johnson, whose only offence was his fastidiousness and unwillingness to go along with John’s rhetoric of violence. The final scene of the movie shows Jamie persuading David (one of the few wholesome characters in the film) to check out a computer supposedly offered for sale in Snowtown. They stop for a beer, they stop again so Jamie can urinate in a creek. He runs back to the car to accompany David to his death; the car is parked at a crossroads, clearly a symbol, a suggestion that Jamie, who is depicted as hating all the violence, could have chosen a different path at any time.

John Bunting, Australia’s most prolific serial killer, was convicted of eleven murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Robert Wagner, his main accomplice, was convicted of ten murders and sentenced also to life without parole. Mark Haydon was initially charged with two murders but was only convicted on five counts of assisting. The jury did not come to a decision on two murder charges against Haydon, and another charge of assisting murder, which never came to retrial.

More than 250 suppression orders originally prevented publication of the details of this case at the time. In early 2011, a judge lifted the remaining orders in response to a request by the producers of the film Snowtown. Haydon was sentenced to 25 years, which he has now completed; he is back in the community on parole, with the head of the parole board saying he’s well behaved and poses no risk to the community. He has been moved to the Adelaide Pre-Release Centre – a low security facility where prisoners can participate in accompanied and unaccompanied leave, including for work and education. The usual conditions of parole apply (no binge drinking – yet), but he will be a free man in May 2024 when his sentence expires.  

Jamie, presented in the film as an unwilling and even sympathetic killer, pleaded guilty to four murders and provided testimony against the other men, in exchange for a lesser sentence. He testified about the cannibalism that is not shown in this film — that Bunting and Wagner hacked at David’s body to make sure it would fit in the barrel and then sliced off a sliver of flesh from the right thigh. They heated a frying pan, cooked the flesh, and handed it around. Jamie’s testimony was the only evidence police had that cannibalism had taken place, and was presented by his attorney as proof that he was fully cooperating and deserved a lighter sentence. In 2005, when Haydon’s murder charges were dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions, several suppression orders were lifted. These detailed the murder and cannibalism of the final victim, David Johnson.

Jamie Vlassakis was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences with a non-parole period of 26 years, which means it is possible he could be released on parole in 2025. He will be 45 years old.

The film is gritty and brutal, particularly the scenes of Jamie’s rape, and the torture of their victims. But it is compelling watching, and the acting and directing are quite brilliant, capturing the loss of innocence that starts with abuse and ends with brutality. Bunting’s early life reportedly was very rough; he said he enjoyed killing ants with acid, an idea he later transposed to those humans he saw as vermin. When he grew up, he worked at a slaughterhouse, where he would brag about slaughtering animals, saying that’s what he enjoyed the most. Later, when he moved in on Jamie’s family, he would kill cats and dogs and skin them while making Jamie watch. We see Jamie transform from the innocent teenager who stands around smoking at the start of the film to a shaven-headed killer, and even his little brother is shown with his head shaved, starting his short journey from childhood abuse to callousness.

The film is all about that loss of innocence. At an early age, these kids are introduced to poverty, abuse and violence that is a hallmark of violent, carnivorous society. Children famously love “animals” when they are little, recognising their own infant state of being helpless and unable to communicate, yet are socialised into carnivory by the peer pressure to conform and their recruitment into the ceaseless human war on nature. Animals, particularly the chattel slave animals generally referred to by their monetary value, “livestock”, are nothing and nobody. It is only a small step for John Bunting to assume the same about those he hunts, and so why would he flinch at eating them? It is the logical next step.

The film closes as Jamie shuts the door of the vault, trapping the unfortunate David Johnson with the killer gang. We don’t see the murder, or the frying pan. Unfortunately, that final step over the thin red line between humans and other animals appears to have been a bridge, or a meal, too far for this film.

Indiana court upholds life sentence for man convicted of murder and cannibalism

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On May 17, 2023, The Indiana Supreme Court in Indianapolis upheld the life sentence without parole for a 41-year-old Indiana man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and dismembering her body before partially eating several of her internal organs.

Joseph Oberhansley was convicted in September 2020 of murder and burglary in the slaying of 46-year-old Tammy Jo Blanton in Jeffersonville in September 2014. Clark Circuit Judge Vicki Carmichael sentenced Oberhansley to life in prison without parole, based on the jury’s recommendation.

Oberhansley’s legal team filed a brief for an appeal in June 2022. It is available at this link. His attorney, Victoria Casanova, argued before the court in April 2023 that her client’s mental health was not taken into consideration and that the jury did not return a proper verdict form in weighing aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

The opinion, written by Justice Christopher Goff, said the jury made “the necessary weighing determination.” Three other justices concurred and Justice Geoffrey Slaughter agreed in part.

The body of Blanton, 46, was found at her home the morning of Sept. 11, 2014, badly mutilated with more than 25 sharp force injuries and multiple blunt force injuries.

Jeffersonville Police reported that at approximately 9:30 a.m. on the morning of Sept. 11, 2014, officers responded to a call requesting a welfare check at Blanton’s home. Several hours earlier, Blanton had called 911 because an angry Oberhansley was upset about the end of their relationship—refusing to leave her home until ordered by several police officers.

Upon arriving at Blanton’s home, officers knocked on the door and Oberhansley answered. A detective on the scene noticed a cut on Oberhansley’s hand and searched him, finding in his pocket a brass knuckle and a knife that appeared to have hair and blood on it.

Investigators obtained a warrant for the home and inside the bathroom found a “big bloody mound of something in the bathtub.” It was Blanton’s body. She had been stabbed 25 times in the head, neck, and chest.

The body had also been extensively mutilated. The front portion of her skull, a portion of her brain, lung, and most of her heart had been removed. Further investigation revealed that parts of her organs were found on a dinner plate next to a frying pan, bloody knives, and a pair of tongs that had blood on them.

During a subsequent interview with police, Oberhansley “revealed to the detectives that he ate Tammy’s brain” and that he also “tried to pull the ‘third eye’ out with tongs,” police wrote. He also admitted to eating the organs that he removed from Blanton. Oberhansley was originally charged with murder, abuse of a corpse (because cannibalism is not a crime in 49 US states) and breaking and entering.

Oberhansley testified that two men had been at the victim’s home when he arrived around 4 a.m. that morning and said they were responsible for Blanton’s death. He said the men had knocked him out and that he awoke when police arrived.

Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull told jurors Wednesday during opening statements in Oberhansley’s murder trial:

“Joseph Oberhansley butchered Tammy Blanton like you wouldn’t kill a livestock animal. But this lady died with dignity.”

Mull said Blanton locked herself in a bathroom before Oberhansley kicked a door down and attacked her — just one week after holding her captive and raping her. Oberhansley told police during a videotaped interview that Blanton “really wasn’t all that scared, surprisingly,” as if she knew she was about to die, Mull recalled. “In her last moments, she wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of seeing her scared,” the prosecutor said.

 A psychologist testified at trial that Oberhansley was “the most severely mentally ill person whose case she had reviewed,” Oberhansley’s defence attorney Cara Schaefer Wieneke wrote:

“It would be easy to look at the horrors visited upon Tammy and conclude they were simply the actions of a monster. But doing so would be reductive, and this Court’s 7(B) review must look deeper. This Court must consider his actions in the context of his profound mental illness.
There is also no question that Oberhansley was suffering from a severe mental illness when he committed this crime. What there is a question about, however, is whether Tammy would be alive today if Oberhansley were not so severely mentally ill. There are reasons to believe that she would. Because of that, Oberhansley asks this Court to find his sentence of life without parole is inappropriate.”

Oberhansley’s mental state was a recurring complication in the court process, in which he was found at different times competent and incompetent. For example, in 2017, his defence wrote that their client believed they were working for the devil, according to The Courier-Journal.

The case was originally declared a mistrial after witness testimony put forth information about Oberhansley’s past that parties had stipulated would not be introduced during the proceedings. For example, it was not specified in court that the defendant had spent a 12-year stint in a Utah prison for manslaughter because—while he was jealous and high on meth—he shot and killed his girlfriend Sabrina Elder, and shot his own mother (who later forgave him).

Oberhansley’s sister had grabbed his and Elder’s infant son. He shot at them, but missed. Then Oberhansley shot himself in the head. He survived, but a psychiatrist wrote he’d given himself a “partial lobotomy.” He pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge, down from murder. His family was reluctant to take the stand, prosecutors said.

In his first trial over Blanton’s death, Oberhansley’s defence asserted that their client’s mental state was a major factor. Lawyer Bart Betteau cited horrifying details of the murder, saying that jurors would hear that Oberhansley believed Blanton was going to kill him and that she could hear his thoughts.

“Think about the process and say to yourself, is this someone who’s thinking right? His thought was that someone was after him.”

Oberhansley’s attorneys couldn’t mount an insanity defence, however. They lost their ability to do so in return for the state declining to seek the death penalty. The attorneys’ previous attempt to lodge an insanity defence was thwarted when Oberhansley filed a motion to withdraw it. He denied living with a mental illness.

Oberhansley is incarcerated at the New Castle Psychiatric Unit of the Indiana Department of Correction.

The most interesting part of this extended legal battle (nine years) from the point of view of Cannibal Studies is the statement from the prosecutor about the victim being “butchered… like you wouldn’t kill a livestock animal.” Philosophers struggle with the inconsistency of our social customs – we cherish dogs and cats, protect whales, but accept the butchery in mind-boggling numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, and others. We know about the horrendous suffering in the slaughterhouse, but close our minds to it. We know that on top of its appalling cruelty, the meat industry is one of the largest sources of greenhouse emissions as well as a cause of several severe human health problems such as hypertension and colon cancer. Yet the meat industry remains exempt from much of the environmental and health debate that surrounds other issues. Stanley Cavell states that becoming part of a social contract requires becoming “conspirators”, agreeing implicitly what will be acceptable, disregarding its ethical conundrums. Such “perpetual failure of justice invites the threat of madness”.

Cannibals are routinely described as insane, as if their capricious psychotic episodes fully explain both their choices and the appalled revulsion of the rest of society. Oberhansley’s appeal described him as “detached from reality”. But the persistent portrayal of cannibalism as unthinkable and cannibals as insane relates to their refusal of the fissure between reality and the language able to describe it. The cannibal personifies ruthless attempts to satisfy voracious human appetites, while realising the animality of fellow humans; he puts the unthinkable into reality through the flesh and blood of his victim. His madness arises in the gap between the carefully expurgated language of the social contract and the reality of the world as a giant slaughterhouse.

Tomorrow I will cook him – “ARMIN MEIWES” (SKYND, 2022)

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Seems to be the month for cannibal music videos. Last week we looked at the new song CANNIBAL by Marcus Mumford, directed by Steven Spielberg. A beautiful ballad about metaphoric cannibalism, the kind of cannibalism that relationships can turn into, particularly abusive ones. Mumford seems to be referring to child abuse, accusing his abuser of taking “the first slice of me and you ate it raw. Ripped it with your teeth and lips like a cannibal.”

This week’s video (the clip is at the top of this blog) is by the industrial/electronic music duo SKYND, who pioneered the true crime music genre, which presents stories based on murders and other crimes. They have previously written about the death of Elisa Lam whose body was found in a hotel cistern in LA, the manslaughter of Conrad Roy whose girlfriend sent text messages encouraging him to commit suicide, the mass suicide in Jonestown, the Columbine High School massacre, and killers such as Gary M. Heidnik and Katherine Knight.

Most of those songs weren’t about cannibals (Katherine Knight maybe, who killed and cooked her husband, although she didn’t eat him). But the song we are reviewing today retells poetically the story of one of the world’s most famous cannibals, Armin Meiwes, the German man who advertised for someone who wanted to be eaten, and then ate him.

The song starts with the repeated refrain

Let him be fat or lean, let him be fat or lean
Tomorrow I will kill him, tomorrow I will…
Let him be fat or lean, let him be fat or lean
Tomorrow I will cook him, tomorrow I will…

This is a reference to the fairy tale Hänsel und Gretel, recorded by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812. You may remember this one giving you nightmares when you were very small – two children are abandoned in a forest by their penurious parents and, on the verge of starvation, come across a gingerbread house which they proceed to chew on, only to be captured by the owner, a witch, who wishes to enslave Gretel and eat Hansel, be he fat or lean. The story was reimagined a couple of years ago as the splendid movie Gretel and Hansel.

You may also remember (at least, Fannibals will) that Hannibal Lecter referred to this fairy-tale when he was serving up dinner to Abel Gideon; Gideon’s own leg, smoked in candy apples and thyme, glazed, and served on a sugar cane quill.

Armin Meiwes advertised in 2001 on a fetish website called The Cannibal Café for “a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed”. The only reply that seemed sincere, indeed eager, was from a man named Jürgen Brandes, who was not really well-built or 18-30, but Meiwes was a tolerant sort of bloke, or perhaps desperate for his first human-meat meal, so they got together and, after getting to know each other (which included slicing off Brandes’ penis and cooking it), Meiwes left his friend to bleed out in the bath, and then proceeded to butcher his carcass and eat the meat, in a variety of cuts:

Cutlets
Ham
Goulash
Steaks
Knuckles
Bacon
Portion by portion
Cator, you’re a part of me now…
Forever

There is also a reference to Meiwes in the Hannibal episode “Digestivo”, when Mason Verger is planning on eating Hannibal and refers to Meiwes and Brandes eating the latter’s penis, even though it was radically overcooked.

If you want to know more about the case (for which Meiwes is still serving time), there are several excellent links on the Skynd case files website (these guys do their homework!).

Skynd said in an interview:

“When I investigated the case, I watched an interview with him. Meiwes didn’t seem like the typical beast you’d imagine when you think of a ‘cannibal.’ But then again, you might ask yourself, ‘What does a cannibal even look like?’ It’s a story that hasn’t left me for years and I feel like I have finally translated it into music.”

There are a lot of documentaries on this event, which mostly involve ominous music and hushed narratives and absurd comparisons to Hannibal Lecter. Also a movie in which their names were changed, and another one in which they weren’t given names at all.

Or you can just watch this video, which sums up the salient points rather succinctly.

Table set for tonight
Waited for this all my life
Candle lights shining bright
Pull the cork, pour the red wine
Long, big steak on my plate
Potatoes and sprouts on the side
I savor my first bite
Satisfied my appetite.

But before the killing and eating, which Meiwes had wanted to do for most of his life (and which Brandes seemed to want just as much), there was the question of what the “livestock” industry likes to call “humane slaughter”, one of the great oxymorons of the modern world. Brandes apparently wanted to be eaten alive, feel teeth tear into his flesh, but Meiwes was more considerate – pain may be a fun sexual fantasy, but it can really hurt. So they stopped on the way home (Brandes had only bought a one-way train ticket) and bought cough medicine (BREToN, which according to Google is Tulobuterol Hydrochloride and is for “asthma exacerbation”, although the website does rather hilariously say:

“Breton Syrup may also be used for purposes not listed here”

Two bottles of that, a fistful of sleeping tablets washed down with a bottle of schnapps, and Brandes was good to go. They collaboratively cut off his penis (again, it was supposed to be a tooth job, but it was too tough) and cooked it. It was inedible, and Meiwes threw it out (although an urban myth has developed that he fed it to a dog). Then Meiwes put Brandes in the bath to bleed to death and went off to read a Star Trek novel.

Pain killers, cough syrup
Sleeping pills, bottle of schnapps
Sink your teeth, chew it up
Take a knife, make a clean cut
Roast the flesh, medium heat
Add garlic, pepper and salt
Meat is too tough to eat
So I’ll feed it to the dog.

Waiting for him to bleed out
Reading Star Trek for three hours
Finally kiss him once and kill him then slaughter him like a piece of…
Like a piece of livestock.

The clip ends with Father (the multi-instrumentalist other half of the duo) appearing as Meiwes, sitting down to have ‘an old friend for dinner’.

Of course, that is the point of this story. Farmers claim to love their animals and then send them off to a terrifying death, hung upside down with their throats cut. There is evidence that Meiwes probably witnessed the slaughter of pigs when he was a child, and found it arousing. In an interview, Meiwes said the butchering was simple:

“It was like cutting up a pig. Meat is meat.”

Meiwes was originally convicted of manslaughter, which caused an uproar in the media. His story was soon adapted in movies, and in the song “Mein Tell” by Rammstein, who then faced the threat of being sued by the cannibal for plagiarism!

Meiwes’ verdict was later amended to murder, a strange decision – can you murder someone who wants to die? His simple claim in his defence was that, unlike pigs, sheep, cows, chickens and other animals, here was a willing victim who consented to, indeed demanded, his own slaughter and consumption. Is it not clearly more ethical to eat an animal who wants to be eaten, whatever the species, than one who does not?

Cannibal Romcom: FRESH (Mimi Cave 2022)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films6 Comments

If you’ve heard about this new movie, you’ll know it’s a sort of cannibal romcom.

Perhaps the first romcom was Adam and Eve – she was created from his rib, as “an help meet” (Genesis 2:18-21) because he was incapable of looking after Eden on his own. And he was, you know, horny. Ever since, relationships have been tricky – they’re about status, property rights and, above all, appetites. Feudal lords sealed alliances by betrothing their children, often marrying their small child off to a complete stranger. For most of human history, women were property, owned by their fathers until ownership was transferred to their husbands. What happened to them after that was up to the appetites of the man. It often still is.

Modern dating has in many ways returned to the realm of the unknown betrothal. Pictures appear on a phone screen and are assessed in an instant. If a candidate is deemed possibly sponge-worthy, a meeting is arranged and may lead to casual sex, long-term commitment or, in unfortunate cases, cannibalism.

What do we know about the person on the dating scene? Each click, each drink, is a contract, the person being (inter)viewed is already objectified by the algorithm that has decided he or she may be suitable. Relationships are chosen in the same way (and often with less forethought) as an Uber-eats meal. The app reduces us to our basics – appearance, tastes – we’re just meat.

This movie, Fresh, the first film by director Mimi Cave and writer Lauryn Kahn (good interview here but beware of spoilers) and produced by Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up), takes the metaphor to its logical conclusion. Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones from Normal People), finds herself dating boors who feel entitled to comment on her appearance, are interested exclusively in themselves, and abuse her if she dares to refuse sex. As a woman, her body is their entitlement.

Noa meets Steve (Sebastian Stan from Winter Soldier), not on her dating site, which has been a huge disappointment to her, but in a supermarket. Steve seems charming, clever, and doesn’t press her for sex. When he draws back from sex on their first date, the first time a man has done that in her experience (maybe in history) she asks him if he wants something to drink or eat, and he says “no, just you”. He ruins her enjoyment of her spare ribs by saying “I don’t eat animals.” He means non-human animals, but it’s a common piece of lazy language; he eats humans, and humans are of course animals.

Noa agrees to a weekend getaway with Steve after only a few dates. Bad idea. This starts as a romcom but ends up covered in blood and body parts. Images of other animals waiting to be eaten reinforce the point.

Steve wants to know whom Noa has told. Who knows she is going away with him?

Steve drugs Noa (another common dating strategy) and only then do the credits start, some 33 minutes into the film, as she collapses to the floor.

Steve imprisons her, finally revealing his plan: to keep her alive and slowly sell her meat to his wealthy cannibal clients, keeping the rest of her alive and “fresh” (thus the film title) as long as possible.

Sounds grim? Sure, but also darkly funny. Steve is witty and charming apart from the, you know, kidnapping and cannibalism, and Noa is smart and tough, as she has to be in this dog-eat-dog, or man-eat-woman, world. She has to woo her abuser, as so many women do, in order to escape, even if that means eating human flesh, even perhaps her own.

This is a smart and gripping cannibal film from – wait for it – Disney! Produced by Searchlight, the studio of Nomadland and The Shape of Water, it premiered at Sundance in January this year and was released on Disney+ in the UK but Hulu in the US. It certainly is a long way from Mickey Mouse and Snow White. Yet, like them, it has a moral of sorts. As one reviewer put it:

You will want to become a vegetarian after watching “Fresh.”

Another reviewer (beware of spoilers in this link) wrote:

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, am never eating meat again.

Noa is the protagonist, and the main plot involves her predicament and her attempts to escape (no spoilers!) But Steve is a fascinating character in that he really likes Noa, feels a little bit bad about what he does, but likes the money more. Does that remind us of the farmers who claim to “love” their animals, even as they fatten them up for the abattoir? How many stories have we heard of country kids who befriend a baby lamb or calf or piglet and weep when dad appears with a cleaver, only to get over it and become killers themselves. Steve is the same, but his “livestock” are young women. He likes them, but it’s a business – he packages up their meat, their hair, even their underwear for those who want them. His cold room is full of chilled meat, carefully labelled with the names of the women it came from.

Steve’s wife, who knows exactly what he does, asks him “how was work?” He replies that he is very busy with the “new product”.

He can’t afford to care. Nor can his wife, who is missing a leg. She is a “product” whom he adopted. She knows the answer to the header of my blog “what’s it like to be edible?”

It reminded me of an interview with a slaughterhouse worker in Gail Eisnitz’s extraordinary book Slaughterhouse about the workers who kill for a living and the animals who we choose to eat, the ones that are least aggressive, the gentle and friendly species:

If you work in that stick pit for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care…. You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them – beat them to death with a pipe. I can’t care.

This is not a dystopia, it is our world, now, a world in which the rich can buy anything they want including the labour, homes and bodies of others. Steve describes them as the “one percent of the one percent” – they want what no one else can have.

And it’s women they want to eat, because it’s all about ownership and power.

Think of Jeffrey Epstein who supplied underage girls to the rich and powerful. Gary Heidnik started a church which made him a lot of money and then, like Steve in this film, kidnapped, tortured, and raped six women, killing two of them and allegedly feeding the survivors with the flesh of one of the dead. Patrick Bateman was a (fictional) cannibal in the book (if not the film) of American Psycho, consuming human brains because there were absolutely no limits to his appetites.

Is there really anything to stop the “one percent of the one percent” paying to satisfy their cannibalistic appetites? If they are tired of beef and lamb, what meat is next? Millions of people disappear each year, and many are never found. Could some of them be ending up on the plates of the rich?

What Steve does to the lonely women he kidnaps is shocking. But so is what we pay minimum wage workers to do to other species. As Hannibal said, “It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals”. Eating other mammals such as Bos taurus, Ovis aries or Sus domesticus is only one thin red species line away from eating Homo sapiens.

Fresh is currently showing 81% fresh (has to really) on Rotten Tomatoes.