Cannibalism

by Bill Schutt

  So why the fascination with cannibalism? Or vampirism? Or serial killers? Perhaps the violent scenarios we watch and read about on a daily basis are a form of drug—one that creates excitement in lives that might otherwise be mundane and unfulfilled. According to Andrew Silke, head of criminology at the University of East London, “Viewing anything that involves violence or death will kick-start a lot of psychological processes, such as stress and excitement. Your brain’s neocortex becomes psychologically aroused, but not in a dangerous way since you’re in the safe environment of your own home.”

  There is no definitive answer as to why cannibalism provides us with such stimulation, although what is clear, and what remains extremely disturbing for me, is our increasing desensitization to violence and gore—a trait that does not bode well for the future.

  Along those lines, what would it take for cannibalism to become widespread behavior? Could it happen and, if so, how might that come about? Discounting a zombie apocalypse for now, I believe there’s a scientific basis for outbreaks of widespread cannibalism, and the trigger could be something that has initiated it again and again throughout history.

  The process of desertification is taking place right now in the United States, in places like Texas and even California, where researchers Daniel Griffin and Kevin Anchukaitis used soil moisture to measure drought. They determined the 2012–2014 period to be the most arid on record in 1,200 years, with 2014 coming in as the driest single year. Around the globe, across vast expanses of China, Syria, and central Africa, regions that only recently experienced dry seasons are becoming deserts. The populations of Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia, three of the poorest countries in the world, are suffering through the worst drought conditions in 60 years.

  In the Darfur region of the Sudan (Africa’s third largest country), rainfall has fallen off 30 percent over the past 40 years, and the Sahara desert is advancing into what was once farmland at a rate of one mile per year. Famine and diminishing access to fresh water are now a daily reality for more than 12 million Africans, and these problems are growing worse every year. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), many of the conflicts in Africa, such as those between farmers and herdsmen, have been driven by “climate change and environmental degradation.”

  In 1973, Hollywood imagined just such an environmental disaster scenario in Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston. His character, Frank Thorn, is a policeman in the hyper-crowded city of New York, circa 2022. Real food is now an extremely rare extravagance and most of the population subsists on nutrition wafers—including everybody’s new favorite, Soylent Green. With the aid of his old friend Sol (the incomparable Edward G. Robinson, in his last role), Thorn is working on the murder of a rich Soylent Corporation executive.

  During his examination of the crime scene, Thorn removes some “evidence” from the executive’s apartment. This includes real food, a bottle of bourbon, and a classified oceanographic survey, dated 2016. Sol and his cronies (a group of like researchers referred to as “Books”) learn that the oceans are dead and therefore unable to produce the algal protein from which Soylent Green is reputedly made. They speculate on the real ingredients and the news is not good. Heartbroken, Sol shuffles off to a government euthanasia center, downs a lethal cocktail, and dies, but not before he whispers his secret into Thorn’s ear. Outside the building, the cop sneaks into the back of a truck supposedly transporting the bodies of the euthanized to a crematorium, but instead it heads straight to the Soylent manufacturing facility where Sol’s dying words are confirmed.

  “They’re making our food out of people!” Thorn tells a fellow cop (after the requisite gun battle). “Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle.” Seriously wounded, Thorn is carried away on a stretcher, screaming what would become the American Film Institute’s 77th most famous quote in movie history.

  “Soylent Green is people!”

  Though the special effects are dated and the action is reduced to the standard cop chases the bad guys, Soylent Green remains a scary 1970s take on an Earth ravaged by climate change, pollution, and overpopulation. It is a nightmare vision that comes complete with government-sanctioned cannibalism—embraced and efficiently carried out by Big Business.

  And now for a bit of 21st-century speculation, which might sound hypocritical coming from someone who’s been trying to avoid cannibal-related sensationalism for the past 19 chapters.

  Since cannibalism is a completely normal response to severe stress, especially during times of famine and warfare, how much of a surprise would it be if the butchery of humans for food becomes commonplace in drought-ridden and overpopulated regions of the near-future Earth? According to sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, famine-related cannibalism occurred 11 times in Europe between 793 CE and 1317 CE, as well as in “ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, Persia, India, China and Japan.”

  In a world where global climate change is taking place before our very eyes, there may be little to prevent famine-related cannibalism from happening again, especially in the poorest and most unstable countries in the world. Even scarier, knowing what we know about spongiform encephalopathies like kuru, as well as what we don’t know, the consequences of widespread cannibalism would likely extend beyond the horrific images that would find their way onto the nightly news and social media. Could something like kuru become an epidemic on an even wider scale than it did in New Guinea? According to biological anthropologist Simon Underdown, it might have happened already.

  Underdown thinks that it is possible that not all of the victims of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) were burger-chomping Brits or New Guineans whose Stone Age lifestyles lasted well into the 20th century. He suggests that some of those victims may actually have lived in the Stone Age, and that their disappearance some 30,000 years ago may have been hastened by the widespread practice of cannibalism and a kuru-like epidemic that resulted from the behavior.

  Underdown summarized his hypothesis by first reminding me that “most of us have shifted to the idea that there were a number of Neanderthal extinctions, taking place at different times and at different locations.” There is also evidence, he said, that Neanderthals “engaged in cannibalism to some degree.” Having established a potential route for the contraction of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, Underdown suggested that, in addition to the actual consumption of diseased individuals, disease transmission might have occurred through the use of stone tools contaminated by the blood and tissue of infected individuals. Like Shirley Lindenbaum’s explanation for how kuru was spread along trade routes and through the movement of individuals between groups, Underdown hypothesized that similar actions could have introduced “new clusters of TSE infection” into the small, spread-out groups of Neanderthals.

  Underdown then described a model he designed to test the effect of a disease like kuru on Neanderthal population numbers, which he estimated to be in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 individuals at any one time. The results of his “Kuru Model” suggested that deaths from a kurulike TSE “could reduce the population to non-viable levels within the space of 250 years.”

  To be clear, Underdown wasn’t claiming that kuru was the sole reason that the Neanderthals disappeared. If one imagined, though, that a kurulike disease arose on multiple occasions within small populations, the effect would have been more localized, “a drip, drip effect” rather than a massive extinction event. Perhaps the invasion of the Neanderthal homeland by modern humans served as the coup de grâce to a species whose cannibalistic habits had already brought them to the brink of extinction.

  Of course, any future outbreaks of kuru would occur in a world that has seen tremendous advances in many fields of medicine. But on the other side of the ledger, one need only look at the massive death toll from recent Ebola epidemics to realize that cannibalism-related outbreaks of kuru could have a devastating effect on local populations. The debate over what causes kuru and other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies is s
till ongoing within the scientific community. Are TSEs caused by a virus or by prions? The argument would certainly go public if desertification and global climate change (or perhaps another environmental disaster) led to outbreaks of cannibalism and the associated neurological diseases. With two Nobel Prizes already awarded for research into TSEs, in all likelihood someone would win another for finally figuring it all out. And what would they call this new cannibalism-related nightmare? Mad cow disease and the laughing death are already taken. The new strain, with its potential for killing on a scale unprecedented for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, would need its own name—something lurid. And the only certainty is that someone will come up with one.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank my agent Gillian MacKenzie for her hard work, great advice, and perseverance in getting my book off the ground. Thanks also to Kirsten Wolff and Allison Devereux of the Gillian MacKenzie Agency for their assistance, especially during the bumpy stretches.

  I also offer my sincere thanks to Amy Gash, my incredibly talented editor at Algonquin. Thanks also go out to the entire production and marketing teams at Algonquin Books, especially my copy editor, Marina Lowry.

  I was very lucky to have worked with or received assistance from a long list of experts who were extremely generous with their time. Thanks and gratitude go out to: Cristo Adonis, Stephen Amstrup, William Arens, Ronald Chase, Ken Dunn, Rainer Foelix, Laurel Fox, John Grebenkemper (and his dog Kayle), Kristin Johnson (Donner Party expert extraordinaire), Mary Knight, Walter Koenig, Mark Kristal, Nick Levis, Shirley Lindenbaum, John Lurie, Laura Manuelidis, Ryan Martin, Mark Norell, David and Karin Pfennig, Clair and William Rembis (and the 11 “Rembi”), Raymond Rogers, Antonio Serrato, Stephen Simpson, Ian Tattersall, Simon Underdown, Marvalee Wake, Jerome Whitfield, and Mark Wilkinson.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my friends and colleagues in the bat research community and at my favorite place in the world, the American Museum of Natural History. They include Ricky Adams, Wieslaw Bogdanowicz, Frank Bonaccorso, Mark Brigham, Patricia Brunauer (RIP), Deanna Byrnes, Catherine Doyle-Capitman, Betsy Dumont, Neil Duncan, Nicole Edmison, Arthur Greenhall (RIP), “Uncle” Roy Horst, Tigga Kingston, Mary Knight (who told me to blame it on the Greeks), Karl Koopman (RIP), Tom Kunz, Gary Kwiecinski, Ross MacPhee, Eva Meade and Rob Mies (Organization for Bat Conservation), Shahroukh Mistry, Maceo Mitchell, Mike Novacek, Ruth O’Leary, Stuart Parsons, Scott Pedersen, Nancy Simmons (it’s good to know the Queen), Elizabeth Sweeny, Ian Tattersall, Merlin Tuttle, Rob Voss, John Walhert, and Eileen Westwig.

  I’ve been fortunate to have had several incredible mentors, none more important than John W. Hermanson (Cornell University, Field of Zoology). John took a chance on me in 1990 by taking me on as his first Ph.D. student. Among other things, he taught me to think like a scientist, as well as the value of figuring things out for myself. “Here’s to you, Chief.”

  A very special thanks to my great friend, confidant, and coconspirator, Leslie Nesbitt Sittlow, with whom I spent many hours discussing the pros and cons of cannibalism (among other things).

  My dear friends Darrin Lunde and Patricia J. Wynne were instrumental in helping me develop this project from a vague idea into a finished work. A millions thanks also to Patricia for all of the amazing figures. I can’t wait for our next project.

  A special thank you goes out to my teachers, readers, and supporters at the Southampton College Summer Writers Conference, especially Bob Reeves, Bharati Mukherjee, and Clark Blaise.

  At Southampton College (RIP) and LIU Post, thanks and gratitude to Ted Brummel, Scott Carlin, Matt Draud, Gina Famulare, Paul Forestell, Art Goldberg, Katherine Hill-Miller, Jeff Kane, Kathy Mendola, Howard Reisman, Jen Snekser, and Steve Tettlebach. Thanks also to my LIU graduate students: Maria Armour, Aja Marcato, Megan Mladinich, and Chelsea Miller.

  Sincere thanks goes out to the Adamo family, John E.A. Bertram, John Bodnar, Chris Chapin, Alice Cooper, Suzanne Finnamore Luckenbach (who predicted it all), John Glusman, Kim Grant, The Peconic Land Trust, Gary Johnson, Kathy Kennedy, Bob Lorzing, my former agent—the legendary and wonderful Elaine Markson, Carrie McKenna, Farouk Muradali (my friend and mentor in Trinidad), Erin Nicosia (Amercian Cheese), the Pedersen family and various offshoots, Gerard, Oda and Dominique Ramsawak (for their friendship and all things Trinidadian), Isabella Rossellini, Jerry Ruotolo (my great friend and favorite photographer), Laura Schlecker, Richard Sinclair, Edwin J. Spicka (my mentor at the State University of New York at Geneseo), and Katherine Turman (Nights with Alice Cooper). Special thanks also go out to Mrs. Dorothy Wachter, who listened patiently and provided encouragement, nearly forty years ago, when I told her I wanted to write books. I think she would have had a great laugh at the topic of this one.

  Finally, my eternal thanks and love go out to my family for their patience, love, encouragement, and unwavering support, especially Janet Schutt, Billy Schutt, Chuck and Eileen Schutt, Bobby and Dee Schutt, Rob, Shannon and Kelly Schutt, my cousins, nieces and nephews, my grandparents (Angelo and Millie DiDonato), all my Aunt Roses, and of course, my late parents, Bill and Marie Schutt.

  Notes

  Prologue

  ix To mark its 100-year anniversary in 2003: This information appears on AFI’s website, http://www.afi.com/100years/handv.aspx.

  x Stefano’s screenplay for Psycho: Robert Bloch, Psycho (New York: Random House, 1958).

  xi “She isn’t missing,” Gein told them: Francis Miller and Francis Scherschel (photographs), “House of horror stuns the nation,” Life 43, no. 23 (December 2, 1957): 24–32, p. 28.

  xi and a three-page spread in Time: Time, “Portrait of a killer,” 70, no. 23 (December 2, 1957): 32–33.

  xii “I had a compulsion to do it”: Moira Martingale, Cannibal Killers (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1993), p. 81.

  xv “Polar bears resort to cannibalism: Marsh Walton, “Polar bears resort to cannibalism as Arctic ice shrinks,” CNN Tech, September 23, 2008, http://articles.cnn.com/2008-09-23/tech/arctic.ice_1_sea-ice-national -snow-ice-data-center?_s=PM:TECH.

  xv “Climate Change Forcing Polar Bears: Foreign Staff, “Climate change ‘forcing polar bears to become cannibals,’ ” Times (London), December 9, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article 6949625.ece.

  xv It was Reuters, though: I. Williams, “Polar bear turns cannibal,” Reuters, December 9, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures /slideshow?articleId=USRTXRLWU#a=1.

  Chapter 1—Animal the Cannibal

  5 “cannibalism was also a consistent part: Lauren Fox, personal communication.

  5 By the time Fox’s review paper: L. Fox, “Cannibalism in natural populations,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 6 (1975): 87–106.

  5 many that were long considered to be herbivores: Ibid., p. 88.

  6 In 1980, ecologist and scorpion expert: G. Polis, “The evolution and dynamics of intraspecific predation,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 12 (1981): 225–51.

  6 Fox even followed cannibalism’s environmental connection: Fox, “Cannibalism in natural populations,” p. 89.

  7 In 1992, zoologists Mark Elgar and Bernard Crespi: M. A. Elgar and B. J. Crespi, eds., Cannibalism: Ecology and Evolution among Diverse Taxa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

  7 In it, they refined the scientific definition: Ibid., p. 2.

  12 David Pfennig and his colleagues proposed: D. W. Pfennig, “The adaptive significance of an environmentally-cued developmental switch in an anuran tadpole,” Oecologia 85 (1990): 101–7.

  12 Pfennig hypothesized that iodine-containing: D. W. Pfennig, “Proximate and functional causes of polyphenism in an anuran tadpole,” Functional Ecology 6 (1992): 167–74.

  13 Pfennig and his coworkers previously: D. W. Pfennig, P. W. Sherman, and J. P. Collins, “Kin recognition and cannibalism in polyphenic salamanders,” Behavioral Ecology 5 (1994): 225–32.

  15 In species like the flour beetle: F. K. Ho and
P. Dawson, “Egg cannibalism by Tribolium larvae,” Ecology 47 (1966): 318–22.

  Chapter 2—Go On, Eat the Kids

  21 These prepackaged meals: T. M. Spight, “On a snail’s chances of becoming a year old,” Oikos 26 (1975): 9–14.

  22 The black lace-weaver spider: K. W. Kim and C. Roland, “Trophic egg laying in the spider, Amaurobius ferox; mother-offspring interactions and functional value,” Behavioral Processes 50, no. 1 (2000): 31–42.

  22 The ravenous larva of the elephant mosquito: P. S. Corbett and A. Griffiths, “Observations of the aquatic stages of two species of Toxorhynchites (Diptera: Culicidae) in Uganda,” Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London A 38 (1963): 125–35.

  23 In some snail species: B. Baur, “Effects of early feeding experience and age on the cannibalistic propensity of the land snail Arianta arbustorum,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 65 (1987): 3068–70.

  24 In mammals, filial cannibalism: R. Elwood, “Pup-cannibalism in rodents: Causes and consequences,” in Cannibalism: Ecology and Evolution among Diverse Taxa, edited by Mark Elgar and Bernard Crespi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 299–322.

  24 In the fishes, by far the largest: G. FitzGerald and F. Whoriskey, “Empirical studies of cannibalism in fish,” in Elgar and Crespi, Cannibalism, p. 251.