pork – The Cannibal Guy

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.”

I’m spreading this out, one or two episodes at a time rather than binge-watching the whole eight, because I want to savour them, also because that would be like watching a four-hour movie, which I usually only do if Peter Jackson is involved. And I’m trying to finish my thesis, so no four-hour movies for this old student!

If you haven’t read my blog on the first episode, you might want to do that first, as it makes more sense if you know that Delores has just been released from prison after 16 years. Just click here.

Delores is living in the basement of an empanada shop run by Luis, but he is a dreamer, and is quickly going broke. The whole neighbourhood has been gentrified, and people don’t buy empanadas like they used to. Luis keeps inventing new flavours, but none have caught on.

Episode 2 is the setup for the cannibalism to come in episode 3. We know it’s coming, but Delores doesn’t.

Luis is feuding with his landlord, Gideon Pearlman, played by the wonderful comedian Marc Maron (the cranky entrepreneur from the TV show GLOW). Delores plays peacemaker, takes him downstairs and gives him all her money, which turns out to be negligible amount, due to the massive gentrification that has happened in Washington Heights in the last sixteen years while she was in the pokey. He sees her massage table and she offers him her “magic hands”, which of course he misinterprets as an offer of a hand-job. But Delores has learnt self-defence in jail.

“Got to break the C2 or C1 to kill somebody”

Which she does. Not knowing what to do with the body, she runs to the shop and buys spades, saws, gaffer tape and, to be inconspicuous, a whole load of birthday balloons. It really is a dark comedy!

When she comes back, she finds Nellie, who works in the empanada shop, giving away samples of the new taste sensation, MUY LOCO. What’s in it?

Yeah, it’s not pork, it’s long pig, and when she confronts Luis, he tells her he “took care of it”.

Luis is suddenly a huge business success. Everyone loves Muy Loco, including the local cops. And he wants to give Delores the credit, whereas all she wants to do is barf.

“But you, my Delores, you just changed the game for me. You have led me to a pantheon that very few of us who are called to this art are ever privileged enough to touch.
So now, that greedy son of a bitch will get chewed up, shat out and flushed down the toilet.”

The other reason I didn’t want to go past episode three is that Luis and Delores engage in a fundamental philosophical discussion that is key to Cannibal Studies, which we might summarise as “meat is meat”. When Delores refuses to taste Muy Loco because “it’s human fucking flesh in an empanada!”, Luis responds:

“Delores. Meat is meat. Flesh is flesh. The only reason that we eat a pig, or a cow or a lamb, like whatever, is because we are more powerful than them. So we get to feed off them. That’s how we survive, because we are carnivores. That’s just like Darwin and shit, man”

We’re actually not carnivores – that name is reserved for the true predators – tigers, sharks, that sort of animal. We are scavengers, like anchovies, or pigs.

We’re treated to lots of close-ups of meat being chopped, meat being cooked, meat being gobbled up. Viewers may at this point be consoling themselves by saying “it’s not human”, but it’s red meat, it’s from some mammal, and what difference does it make which species?