Tag: meat

THE LION KING (1994, 2019, 2024)

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With the release of another Lion King franchise film, Mufasa, this one a prequel to the earlier story, it is perhaps worth considering the subject of talking animals, and particularly whom they feel OK about eating.

The first film was released in 1994, and was a glorious animation, with music by Elton John and Tim Rice, but was clearly a cartoon, one that has earned almost a billion dollars since its release.

Although we can get into the plot and the emotions of the film, we don’t really feel obliged to believe in the anthropomorphic veracity of cartoon characters. Do we really care if a cartoon duck eats other birds? No, not if he wears clothes and speaks (a form of) English. It is clearly a line drawing that moves, and requires no ethical work.

But in 2019, the film was remade as a photorealistic animation. With a small dose of suspension of disbelief, the animals looked like they were real, roared like lions, but somehow spoke English, some of them, strangely, with an eastern European accent. It was a sensation, so far earning over 1.6 billion dollars.

This blog will appear around Christmas, so I guess it is not unreasonable to unleash my inner Grinch, at least when it comes to anthropomorphic representations of carnivorous virility. As far as we are aware, lions can’t talk, except in movies. They can certainly communicate though, and that communication, particularly the roar that can be heard miles away, is featured prominently in all versions of the Lion King.

If they could talk, would they say and do the things shown in the film? Would they, for example, let a mandrill take their cub and hold him, Michael Jackson-like, over a cliff for the other animals to worship and celebrate? I’m even less sure of how celebratory the prey animals would be about the birth of yet another predator, no matter how cute.

But the main thing that bothered me throughout the film was the food, and it wasn’t (just) because I watched it at lunchtime. We are shown a happy monarchy (the “pride land”) where the devoted subjects are summarily executed and eaten by the king and his family. This is later turned into a blasted desert filled with the bones of the prey animals by a usurper king lion, an evil uncle lifted from Hamlet and made leonine.

Those not privileged to live in the pride-land inhabit a shadow terrain, the “elephants’ graveyard”, where (dark-skinned) hyenas skulk, with little evidence of anything to eat and, we are assured, always hungry. We have the “circle of life” followed by a circle of hell.

Even further away, in a wildness to which the exiled lion cub Simba flees from his evil and murderous uncle, we have a sort of Garden of Eden II. Here, mammals take a pledge not to eat each other, an expanded ring of utopian privilege, which excludes only insects and their pupal forms, who clearly would have to exist in immense numbers to feed a growing lion, let alone his friends.

Listen kid: if you live with us, you’re gonna have to eat like us.
This looks like a good spot to rustle up some grub.
A grub. What’s it look like?
Tastes like chicken.

What is the ecology here, and the ethic behind the food choices?

Simba, the cub and heir apparent, wonders about this too. He and his future wife (lions get married?) are the only ones to connect with all these environments, and Simba the only one to question the implicit ethos of each one. Early in the piece, as he surveys the kingdom where “the light touches” (as opposed to the darkness of the hyena shadowlands), he asks his father why they eat their loyal subjects, the zebras, antelopes and presumably anyone else slower than them. It’s a question most parents dread as they feed lumps of animal flesh to their children, and then read them books about happy animals. It’s the circle of life, says Simba’s Dad, clearing his throat for us all to join a singalong. We eat them, then when we die, our bodies feed the grass, and future victims eat the grass.

Now this is just absurd. I’m not sure how much grass the average antelope eats, but it would need an awful lot of dead lions buried underneath it to make it fecund. Photosynthesis, which combines carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrate and oxygen, is what makes the grass grow. Lion corpses (and presumably lion shit, now enriched with zebra fat) might add some trace elements, but they are hardly necessary. What lions actually do for the environment is thin out the number of herbivores so that they don’t eat all the vegetation and turn the area into desert, which is what inexplicably happens when the bad lion, Scar, and his army of hyenas, eat all the herbivores. Where does all the grass go? It should be a jungle without all those antelopes and giraffes.

Then we have the entemo-vegetarians of the land beyond the shadows where, you know, hakuna matata, there are no worries, unless of course you are an insect. If you search the internet, you will find learned articles on how many hours a day a lion would need to be chewing pupae (it’s a lot more than 24) in order to sustain his life, let alone progress from cub through puberty to full sized adult male. And why can the various mammals and birds talk, but the insects can’t? Jiminy Cricket could talk in the early days of Disney – when did he fall out of the circle of privilege?

It’s all absurd, of course, but it’s what we teach kids, and not just by taking them to see Lion King. When they ask questions like “I love animals, so why are we eating them?” talk of feeding grass with our bones doesn’t cut it, which is probably why so many young people go vegan. The correct answer, which won’t satisfy anyone, is “because we want to, and because we can”. We have the appetite, and we have the power. We arbitrarily decide who is within our circle of privilege.

In the film, lions and all mammals, and some other odd creatures, live without being eaten in a hippie paradise. In the pride-land, under good king Mustafa (Simba’s dad) certain animals are part of the elite and don’t get eaten, while the anonymous proletariat animals seemingly go willingly to their just deserts (or desserts). Contrast this with the hyena shadow land, where, according to a Disney comic book, the hyenas enthusiastically engage in cannibalism, as well as presumably eating the dead elephants who come to the elephant graveyard to die (which, BTW, elephants don’t really do). The human circle of life is less well defined, depending on the culture: in the West, humans consider chickens, pigs and cows outside the elite of the inedible, while dogs, cats and dolphins are inside, and we express moral outrage when these capricious lines are crossed. In other parts of the world, dogs and cats may be delicacies, or cows or pigs may be forbidden. And this blog has brought you many films in which humans are the preferred repast.

Animal activists are often accused of anthropocentrism, having the nerve, for example, to suggest that fish feel pain or dogs feel love. But truly toxic anthropomorphism appears in narratives of talking animals, where we offer temporary anthropomorphic capacities to other species, so that we can push ideological or commercial messages like a “circle of life” to an audience of minors, while pleading disingenuously that these are just cartoons. This cartoon lies to kids about the nature of nature, to promote the acceptability of carnivorous virility.

We don’t do our society any favours by lying to our kids. Lions don’t think about dying or the benefits their carcasses will bestow on the grass. They hunt because they are obligate predators and will starve otherwise, regardless of the available insect population. Humans, on the other hand, are closer to hyenas – scavengers who are never satiated. We don’t keep herbivore numbers in check by eating them; the opposite is the case – we deliberately breed them by the billions, often in appalling conditions, then slaughter them, in terror and agony, in industrial killing centres, polluting the land, degrading the water and filling the air with methane.

It’s not clear if Simba will impose insectivarianism on his kingdom after the credits roll – he may have to, insofar as the flocks seem to have been decimated. But Simba, if he really could talk, would be appalled by the way humans cynically misappropriate the role of predator in order to feed our insatiable appetites. I think perhaps even the hyenas would agree with him.

Corny cannibalism

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Cannibalism is defined by our good friends at Wikipedia as:

“the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food.”

Most dictionaries like to put “human” in there somewhere, but that is just another manifestation of anthropocentrism, a species-wide narcissism that believes everything is just about us. The same ideology also insists that human flesh is somehow different to that of other animals, and human suffering somehow more intense, or at least more important.

Now, we know that corn cobs cannot grow arms and legs and barbecue each other or indeed anyone of another species. As far as we know, they also cannot suffer, as pain is an evolutionary response to danger, and only useful to animals, who can seek to avoid that danger. The concept of corn cobs tormenting and killing other vegetables is absurd.

But that is exactly what humans do, confining, tormenting and slaughtering some eighty billion sentient land animals every year, and several trillion sea animals. We draw the line, usually at other humans, sometimes at dogs and cats in Ohio, but that line is arbitrary and can shift without much impetus.

If corn cobs could eat each other, they probably would. The objectification of the other, human or nonhuman, and the intensity of the slaughterhouse we have built in this world, sees that line between carnivore and cannibal increasingly porous, as we have seen in the hundreds of examples in this blog.

“…as long as human beings will go on shedding the blood of animals, there will never be any peace. There is only one little step from killing animals to creating gas chambers a la Hitler and concentration camps a la Stalin . . . all such deeds are done in the name of ‘social justice’. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, foreword to ‘Vegetarianism, a Way of Life’, by Dudley Giehl

Cannibal influencer arrested in Brazil

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If you by any chance have watched any of the videos of the influencer Israel dos Santos Assis, better known online as Pinguim (Penguin), you may not have guessed that anything controversial was being shown. The Brazilian, from São Francisco do Conde, a city in the metropolitan area of ​​Salvador in Bahiahad, had been gaining more and more followers on social media over the months before his arrest on July 23 2024, when he was apprehended after being caught desecrating graves in the cemetery of San Francisco the Count, in the Salvador Metropolitan Region, and stealing human bones.

Not just bones. The 22-year-old influencer used human flesh from the corpses to cook his most popular dish: feijoada, a bean stew usually involved simmering beans with beef or pork. Both of which have been reported as tasting very similar to human flesh.

One of Pinguim’s videos, which went viral on social media, explained the secrets of adding meat to beans — and how to get the most out of the final dish.

“Treat and throw it in the beans. But you can’t eat it, no, you just chew it and then throw it away. You don’t swallow it, you just chew it and throw it away, you just taste it, it’s sweet.”

The remains were not only for use in his recipes. After being arrested, Israel led the local police to a mangrove swamp where he had hidden numerous bags of bones. He had been sending these to Salvador, the state capital, to be used in satanic rituals.

The suspect was caught after families of buried people reported that graves had been violated and several bones had been stolen.

Pinguim made a video confession to police which was later released to the media. He reported that he had spent hours at the cemetery to see which graves were the most recent; those with the freshest human flesh. He told police he had fried a piece of a person’s leg and seasoned it with lemon and vinegar before chewing on it.

Local reports say he told police that he stole the body parts to order, in exchange for a payment equivalent to about $US50 from three people who wanted to use the bones as part of a black magic ceremony. He used the money to buy shoes and sandwiches, as well as getting his hair cut.

Surprisingly, Pinguim was released on bail pending an ongoing investigation into charges of desecrating a tomb. His lawyer, Luan Santos, told local media his client suffered from mental health issues and was taking anti-depressants. He added that he would be demanding psychiatric tests to ascertain whether the accused was fully aware of what he was doing.

Pinguim’s social media accounts have been deleted.

Brazil has always been a fascinating area for students of cannibalism. One of the most famous tribes was the Tupinamba, who captured a German soldier and explorer named Hans Staden in the sixteenth century. He claimed to have witnessed their cannibalistic rituals and did very nicely from his subsequent writings, illustrated by the graphic woodcuts of Theodor de Bry. As a result, the Portuguese came to save the ‘savages’ from their sins, and through enslavement, assimilation, extermination and the introduction of Smallpox, managed to wipe them out completely.

The classic cannibalism film How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês) is set in this period of imperial invasion, and tries to give a new perspective on the way colonialism used cannibalism as its pretext.

More recently, modern Brazilians have been involved in some of the more interesting cannibalism stories that have graced our news cycles, including the “Cartel” who sold pastries made from human flesh to unwitting customers, and the Brazilian who was arrested in Lisbon for eating a man who had tried to help him. Like most cannibalism films, the ones set in Brazil vary between seeing it as something savages naturally do, such as Emanuelle and the Cannibals, and those that see it as typifying the exploitation of the poor by the rich, such as The Cannibal Club.

The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proposed a ‘post-structural anthropology’ in his book Cannibal Metaphysics. De Castro sought to ‘decolonise’ anthropology by challenging the increasingly familiar view that it was ‘exoticist and primitivist from birth’, denying that cannibalism even existed, and so transferred the conquered peoples from the cannibalistic villains of the West into mere fictions of colonialism. This alternative view of Amerindian culture rejects the automatic assumption of the repugnance of cannibalism, which serves to either confront it or deny its existence. Accepting those parts of colonial culture that are useful (they speak Portuguese for example) can be seen as a form of reverse, cultural cannibalism.

But Pinguim demonstrates that even Brazilians have not fully embraced this philosophy, particularly when it involves digging up their relatives.

There is a video showing Pinguim confessing to cooking human bodies. More interesting if you speak Portuguese though.

Is Oprah a cannibal?

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Well, apparently not.

The claim has been doing the rounds since a silly post on X in February (now archived).

The claim was made in response to an online request for people to share their fave Oprah moment “in honor of Oprah Winfrey’s 70th birthday”.

The post managed to gain some serious attention:

Even the poster didn’t try to persuade people that it was true.

“crying, why are ppl actually believing this … y’all believe anything”

That is certainly true. You may recall an almost identical campaign a few years back which claimed that Anne Hathaway had left evidence of cannibalism in a house she sold in 2013. This turned out to have been a “sociological study.”

Oprah has a history of media interviews in which she discusses food. Recently, she extolled the idea of using medications for losing weight, revealing that she has been using such drugs. Who can say that a high protein, low carb diet based on the cuisine of Dr Hannibal Lecter might not prove effective? Have you ever met a fat cannibal?

In 2008, Oprah went on a three week “vegan cleanse”. At the end of that brief period, she wrote

“At the end of the 21 days, I could not declare myself vegan or even vegetarian. But I am, for sure, more mindful of my choices. I’m eating a far more plant-based diet.”

Maybe giving up meat for health, environmental or ethical reasons could go beyond just avoiding human flesh, for everyone’s health?

Cannibal pig farmer savagely attacked in prison; not expected to survive

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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.”

“Eunuch Maker” jailed for life – he cooked testicles for lunch

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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:

Cannibalism news: LAS VEGAS MAN ACCUSED OF EATING VICTIM’S EYEBALL AND EAR

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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?

Mike Tyson’s edible ears

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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.

California Cannibalism: man arrested after reportedly eating a severed human leg

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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.”

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.

Criminals, rapists and cannibals: Donald Trump and the immigrants

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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.

“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.”

Brian Cox called Trump “such a fucking asshole” and “so full of shit.” So Trump is probably not quoting him.

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?”  

And as Hannibal said,

“It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”