Green Options

It’s been a long-standing joke that female spiders eat their partners after mating because of ttes, hat tongue-in-cheek expression that females devour males. But while species like the black widow and the wolf spider do in fact resort to cannibalism once they’ve got what they need from a mating ritual with a male, science has yet to unquestionably discover why this occurs.

Shrinking sea ice may be to blame for recent polar bear cannibalism incidents in Canada. Eight cases of adult polar bears eating bear cubs and other bears near Churchill, Manitoba, have been reported. Four of the cases were reported to Environment Canada and four to Manitoba Conservation.

Sarah Palin has said many times that the polar bear habitat is safe, and there’s no need to classify them as a “threatened” species.  Yet today comes word that as the Arctic sea ice melts, polar bears are finding less and less food sources and are beginning to cannibalize one another.

Cannibalism has never been a widely accepted art form but when, in 2003, Zhu Yu, a Chinese man, ate a still born baby and filmed himself at it, he called it an art and found nothing wrong with his act. The British Channel 4 TV actually broadcast the Beijing Swings footage and earned a censure from the Independent Television Commission for showing a “lack of respect for human dignity” and having “exceeded the boundaries of acceptability.”

“The broadcast of such images raises serious questions, not only about the morality of the artists in using dead babies in pursuit of their artistic expression, but of the broadcasters’ responsibility not to infringe their dignity,” ITC said.

Cannibalism can be more than art as has been documented among the Yanomami, Coaque and Anasazi Indians. Beth Conklin, an American anthropologist concluded in 2001 that cannibalism had a human face after spending time with the Wari’ Indians in the Amazon.