Text 7411, 56 rader
Skriven 2006-11-08 22:50:08 av MANNY ROTHSTEIN (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av MICHAEL LOO
Ärende: Small Pig, Long Pig 517
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-> 
-> ML> I always heard that most carnivores shun human flesh as

Thats hard to know. Carnivores that become used to human
flesh sometimes seem to develop a preference for eating
people. Accounts from cannibals indicate that we taste
a lot like pork, hence the term "long pig". And who 
doesn't like pork? I side with those who theorize that
animals are cautious, like a lot of people, and tend to prefer 
the foods that they ate while they were growing up. Also I
think that walking upright looks odd and sets us apart from
other animals that might be considered normal prey. Until
scientists resolve this issue, all we can do is guess. But
before Europeans brought firearms to India and Africa, 
individual man eaters would kill hundreds of people and
often continued until they died a natural death. Look up
the Jim Corbett books or Patterson's "The Man Eaters Of 
Tsavo" for some dramatic accounts of life at the second
rung of the food chain.

-> bad-tasting; a shark, for example, will take one bite and
-> then spit it out after learning its mistake. Perhaps some

That is an oft repeated canard that I refute with two words,
the Indianapolis. As you already know, the Indianapolis
was a Navy ship that was sunk by a Japanese torpedo in the
Pacific. 800 people went into the water and 5 or 6 days
later, only about 300 hundred were left when help finally
arrived. Sharks accounted for most of the lost 500. Day
after day, the sharks repeatedly attacked the survivors
who weren't lucky enough to find space out of the water
aboard a lifeboat. It doesn't seem likely that the sharks
were so dumb that they made the same mistake hundreds of
times, day after day. Shark attacks are also grossly 
under-reported because, unless the attack is witnessed 
or physical evidence with bite marks is recovered, people 
who disaper in the ocean are chalked up as drowning 
victims. As for the bite and spit behavior, that seems to 
be SOP for great whites when attacking seals (and 
venomous snakes attacking rodents). It is theorized that 
the sharks do this to let the prey item bleed to death 
before starting to feed in order to avoid the chance of 
injury from a last lucky bite or scratch.

-> tigers have acquired the taste, the same way humans have
-> acquired the taste for blue cheese or durian? But I heard
-> also that the most enthusiastic among man-eaters were the
-> Bengal tigers.
-> 

Bengals live in neighborhoods with with high densities of 
computer programers.

Manny
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