Download or read book Animal Cannibalism written by David Soulsby and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the phenomenon of cannibalism in those animals known to prey upon and eat their own kind. The book is structured in accordance with conventional taxonomy and ranges from microbes to mammals. Where such information is available, the reasons for cannibalistic behaviour are presented for some 2000 species. These show that eating your own kind is very largely a result of the natural struggle for survival or procreation, and not an 'evil' aberration. The behaviours - unpleasant though it may appear - must be far more common in nature than might be imagined, and therefore, has probably evolved as an advantageous adaptation in many species. The book is unusual in its wide survey of cannibalism in nature and may be of use to animal breeders, conservationists, and those who study animal behaviour. Other readers with an interest in natural history, for whatever reason, may find useful information and some surprises in these pages. Even some very familiar household pets are included!
Download or read book Cannibalism written by Bill Schutt and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Surprising. Impressive. Cannibalism restores my faith in humanity.” —Sy Montgomery, The New York Times Book Review For centuries scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portrayed mostly through horror movies or tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life flesh-eaters. But the true nature of cannibalism--the role it plays in evolution as well as human history--is even more intriguing (and more normal) than the misconceptions we’ve come to accept as fact. In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History,zoologist Bill Schutt sets the record straight, debunking common myths and investigating our new understanding of cannibalism’s role in biology, anthropology, and history in the most fascinating account yet written on this complex topic. Schutt takes readers from Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, where he wades through ponds full of tadpoles devouring their siblings, to the Sierra Nevadas, where he joins researchers who are shedding new light on what happened to the Donner Party--the most infamous episode of cannibalism in American history. He even meets with an expert on the preparation and consumption of human placenta (and, yes, it goes well with Chianti). Bringing together the latest cutting-edge science, Schutt answers questions such as why some amphibians consume their mother’s skin; why certain insects bite the heads off their partners after sex; why, up until the end of the twentieth century, Europeans regularly ate human body parts as medical curatives; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals. He takes us into the future as well, investigating whether, as climate change causes famine, disease, and overcrowding, we may see more outbreaks of cannibalism in many more species--including our own. Cannibalism places a perfectly natural occurrence into a vital new context and invites us to explore why it both enthralls and repels us.
Download or read book Cannibalism written by Mark A. Elgar and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the contextual and taxonomic diversity of cannibalism, this book explains its costs, benefits, and consequences for a taxonomically broad distribution of species from lower eukaryotes to higher primates. The authors, all experts in their taxon of interest, use theory developed for the analysis of foraging, sociality, demography, and genetics to assess the ecological and evolutionary causes and effects of cannibalism. The emerging picture from recent research challenges the view that cannibalism is either abnormal behaviour or an infrequent addition to the predator's usual diet.
Download or read book Eat Me written by Bill Schutt and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cannibalism. It's the last, greatest taboo: the stuff of urban legends and ancient myths, airline crashes and Captain Cook. But while we might get a thrill at the thought of the black widow spider's gruesome mating habits or the tragic fate of the nineteenth-century Donner Party pioneers, today cannibalism belongs to history - or, at the very least, the realm of the weird, the rare and the very far away. Doesn't it?Here, zoologist Bill Schutt digs his teeth into the subject to find an answer that is as surprising as it is unsettling. From the plot of Psycho to the ritual of the Eucharist, cannibalism is woven into our history, our culture - even our medicine. And in the natural world, eating your own kind is everything from a survival strategy - practiced by polar bears and hamsters alike - to an evolutionary adaption like that found in sand tiger sharks, who, by the time they are born, will have eaten all but one of their siblings in the womb. Dark, fascinating and endlessly curious, Eat Me delves into human and animal cannibalism to find a story of colonialism, religion, anthropology, dinosaurs, ancient humans and modern consequences, from the terrible 'laughing death' disease kuru to the BSE crisis. And - of course - our intrepid author tries it out for himself.Published in partnership with Wellcome Collection.Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we think and feel about health. Inspired by the medical objects and curiosities collected by Henry Wellcome, it connects science, medicine, life and art. Wellcome Collection exhibitions, events and books explore a diverse range of subjects, including consciousness, forensic medicine, emotions, sexology, identity and death. Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive, funding over 14,000 researchers and projects in more than 70 countries.wellcomecollection.org
Download or read book Tender Is the Flesh written by Agustina Bazterrica and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.
Download or read book The Man Eating Myth written by William Arens and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1980-09-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating and well-researched look into what we really know about cannibalism.
Download or read book Eating Apes written by Dale Peterson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation As Jane Goodall never fails to mention, "bush meat is the greatest conservation crisis in my lifetime." This book documents in text and photographs how wild animals in the Congo Basin, particularly the Great Apes but also chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, are slaughtered and used for human consumption.
Download or read book We Are All Cannibals written by Claude Lévi-Strauss and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context. These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Lévi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.
Download or read book Dinner with a Cannibal written by Carole A Travis-Henikoff and published by Santa Monica Press. This book was released on 2008-03-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting the history of cannibalism in concert with human evolution, Dinner with a Cannibal takes its readers on an astonishing trip around the world and through history, examining its subject from every angle in order to paint the incredible, multifaceted panoply that is the reality of cannibalism. At the heart of Carole A. Travis-Henikoff’s book is the question of how cannibalism began with the human species and how it has become an unspeakable taboo today. At a time when science is being battered by religions and failing teaching methods, Dinner with a Cannibal presents slices of multiple sciences in a readable, understandable form nested within a wealth of data. With history, paleoanthropology, science, gore, sex, murder, war, culinary tidbits, medical facts, and anthropology filling its pages, Dinner with a Cannibal presents both the light and dark side of the human story; the story of how we came to be all the things we are today.
Download or read book Columbus and Other Cannibals written by Jack D. Forbes and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrated American Indian thinker Jack D. Forbes’s Columbus and Other Cannibals was one of the founding texts of the anticivilization movement when it was first published in 1978. His history of terrorism, genocide, and ecocide told from a Native American point of view has inspired America’s most influential activists for decades. Frighteningly, his radical critique of the modern "civilized" lifestyle is more relevant now than ever before. Identifying the Western compulsion to consume the earth as a sickness, Forbes writes: "Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. . . . These characteristics all push towards an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in. . . . This is the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions. I call it cannibalism." This updated edition includes a new chapter by the author.
Download or read book Mother for Dinner written by Shalom Auslander and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the author of Foreskin's Lament, a novel of identity, tribalism, and mothers. Seventh Seltzer has done everything he can to break from the past, but in his overbearing, narcissistic mother's last moments he is drawn back into the life he left behind. At her deathbed, she whispers in his ear the two words he always knew she would: "Eat me." This is not unusual, as the Seltzers are Cannibal-Americans, a once proud and thriving ethnic group, but for Seventh, it raises some serious questions, both practical and emotional. Of practical concern, his dead mother is six-foot-two and weighs about four hundred and fifty pounds. Even divided up between Seventh and his eleven brothers, that's a lot of red meat. Plus Second keeps kosher, Ninth is vegan, First hated her, and Sixth is dead. To make matters worse, even if he can wrangle his brothers together for a feast, the Can-Am people have assimilated, and the only living Cannibal who knows how to perform the ancient ritual is their Uncle Ishmael, whose erratic understanding of their traditions leads to conflict. Seventh struggles with his mother's deathbed request. He never loved her, but the sense of guilt and responsibility he feels--to her and to his people and to his "unique cultural heritage"--is overwhelming. His mother always taught him he was a link in a chain, thousands of people long, stretching back hundreds of years. But, as his brother First says, he's getting tired of chains. Irreverent and written with Auslander's incomparable humor, Mother for Dinner is an exploration of legacy, assimilation, the things we owe our families, and the things we owe ourselves.
Download or read book Animals written by Don Lepan and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2010-05-12 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting dystopian novel that examines how humans mistreat animals, and each other: “A powerful piece of writing, and a disturbing call to conscience” (J.M. Coetzee). It is more than 100 years in the future and the horrors of factory farming, combined with the widespread abuse of antibiotics, have led to mass extinctions. The majority of all mammals, birds, and fish that humans have eaten for millennia no longer exist. Those not fully capable are deemed undeserving of an equal share of scarce medical resources and are ultimately classified as less than human. As paranoia about our food supplies spreads, a forceful new logic takes hold; in the blink of a millennial eye the disenfranchised have become our food. Don LePan’s “well-plotted” and “formally audacious” novel shows us a world at once eerily foreign and disturbingly familiar (Booklist). It follows the dramatic events that unfold within a family after they take in an abandoned mongrel boy. In the sharp-edged poignancy of the ethical questions it poses, in the striking narrative techniques it employs, and above all, in the remarkable power of the story it tells, Animals proves itself a transformative work of fiction.
Download or read book Cannibalism in China written by Key Ray Chong and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eaters of the Dead written by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the meaning of cannibalism. Every culture has monsters that eat us, and every culture repels in horror when we eat ourselves. From Grendel to medieval Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean, and from the Ghuls of ancient Persia to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, tales of being consumed are both universal and universally terrifying. In this book, Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explores the full range of monsters that eat the dead: ghouls, cannibals, wendigos, and other beings that feast on human flesh. Moving from myth through history to contemporary popular culture, Wetmore considers everything from ancient Greek myths of feeding humans to the gods, through sky burial in Tibet and Zoroastrianism, to actual cases of cannibalism in modern societies. By examining these seemingly inhuman acts, Eaters of the Dead reveals that those who consume corpses can teach us a great deal about human nature—and our deepest human fears.
Download or read book Insatiable Appetites written by Kelly L. Watson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this comparative history of cross-cultural encounters in the early North Atlantic world, Kelly L. Watson argues that the persistent rumours of cannibalism surrounding Native Americans served a specific and practical purpose for European settlers. As they forged new identities and found ways to not only subdue but also co-exist with native peoples, the cannibal narrative helped to establish hierarchical categories of European superiority and Native inferiority upon which imperial power in the Americas was predicated."--Cover.
Download or read book The Cannibal Within written by Lewis F. Petrinovich and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cannibal Within offers an evolutionary account of the propensity of human beings, in extreme circumstances to eat other human beings, despite the strong Western taboo against such practices. What sets this volume apart from the large body of literature on cannibalism, both popular and anthropological, is the underlying premise: cannibalism as an alternative to starvation is tacitly condoned by the same biological morality that would condemn cannibalism of other sorts in non-threatening situations. Deep as the taboos may be, the survival instinct runs even deeper. The title of the book reflects the author's belief that cannibalism is not a pathology that erupts in psychotic individuals, but is a universal adaptive strategy that is evolutionarily sound. The cannibal is within all of us, and cannibals are within all cultures, should the circumstances demand cannibalism's appearance and usage. Petrinovich's work is rich in historical detail, and rises to a level of theoretical sophistication in addressing a subject too often dealt with in sensationalist terms. The major instances in which survival cannibalism has occurred convinced the author that there is a consistent pattern and a uniform regularity of order in which different kinds of individuals are consumed. In considering who eats whom, when, and under what circumstances, this regularity appears, and it is consistent with what would be expected on the basis of evolutionary or Darwinian theory. In short, he concludes that starvation cannibalism is not a manifestation of the chaotic, psychotic behavior of individuals who are driven to madness, but reveals underlying characteristics of evolved human beings. Lewis Petrinovich is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology of the University of California, Riverside and is currently a resident of Berkeley, California.
Download or read book Gory Details written by Erika Engelhaupt and published by National Geographic. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Erika Engelhaupt, founding editor of National Geographic's Gory Details blog, explores oft-ignored but alluring facets of biology, anatomy, space exploration, nature, and more. Featuring reporting and interviews with leading researchers in the field, Gory Details illuminates the world's most intriguing real-world applications of science"--
