Man-eater

“ In these regions, where man must contend with this animal for dominion over nature, the former sometimes falls a victim, upon which the tiger begins to acquire a preference for the taste of human flesh, and when it has once devoted itself to this novel form of chase, the pursuit of mankind, it gets the name of man-eater. ”

“ Oh, I do see myself to-day that one man who appeared in the elder world, blonde, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a root-digger, a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through millenniums of years wandered the world around seeking meat to devour and sheltered nests for his younglings and sucklings. ”

“ We tore the loaves with our fingers and with a hunk of bread in one hand and a strip of heart in the other we each ate a pound of meat and half a loaf of bread for breakfast, dinner, and supper.
“Man is uniquely a savage eater of carrion,” he informed me, chewing vigorously. “What lion or tiger would relish another’s ancient, putrefying kill? What vulture or hyena displays human ferocity? Too, we are cannibals at heart. We eat our gods; we have always eaten our gods.”
“Isnt that figurative, or poetic, Mr Tyss? ”

“ Your man-eater, as they of India call the tiger who has once tasted blood of the human, care no more for the other prey, but prowl unceasingly till he get him. This that we hunt from our village is a tiger, too, a man-eater, and he never cease to prowl. ”

“ As to sport, I would only put in a plea for that much maligned friend of the agriculturist the tiger, who keeps down the head of crop- destroying deer, antelope and pig, and takes a comparatively moderate toll of cattle. The man-eater is a disgrace to his class and of rare occurrence. ”

“ These, however, were only the earlier efforts of the man-eaters. Later on, as will be seen, nothing flurried or frightened them in the least, and except as food they showed a complete contempt for human beings. ”

“ A few are designated "man-eaters"; these are sometimes naturally ferocious, and having attacked a human being, they may have devoured the body and thus have acquired a taste for human flesh; or they may have been wounded upon more than one occasion and have learnt to regard man as a natural enemy ”

“ Not that food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors; when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us. If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tid-bits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. ”

“ In the portrait of the Feegeean you will expect something frightfully hideous,—knowing, as you already do, that he is an eater of human flesh,—a man of gigantic stature, swarthy skin, bloodshot eyes, gaunt, bony jaws, and terrific aspect. You will expect this man to be described as being naked,—or only with the skin of a wild beast upon his shoulders,—building no house, manufacturing no household or other utensils, and armed with a huge knotted club, which he is ever ready to use:—a man who dwells in a cavern, sleeps indifferently in 11the open air or under the shelter of a bush ”

“ Ridley disputes the common stories as to man-eaters. If a Tiger has once tasted human flesh it does not always confine itself afterwards to that article of diet, nor is it only aged and comparatively toothless animals which hunt man. ”

“ As for the beast that takes to man-eating, what was most probably at first an accidental event, now becomes the occupation of its life. In the first place it encountered men casually, now this is done with intention. ”

“ And ah! [he exclaims] how much more innocent, sweet, and healthful is a table covered with those than with all the reeking flesh of butchered and slaughtered animals. Certainly man by nature was never made to be a carnivorous animal, nor is he armed at all for prey and rapine, with jagged and pointed teeth and crooked claws sharpened to rend and tear, but with gentle hands to gather fruit and vegetables, and with teeth to chew and eat them. ”

“ Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless. ”

“ It is just one of the sorriest results of our flesh-eating habits that the animals sacrificed to man's appetite have been systematically and methodically made hideous, shapeless, and debased in intelligence and moral worth. The name even of the animal into which the boar has been transformed is used as the grossest of insults; the mass of flesh we see wallowing in noisome pools is so loathsome to look at that we agree to avoid all similarity of name between the beast and the dishes we make out of it. ”

“ However, being naturally a bold, lively spirited man, he entered into the humor of the thing, and sat down to the feast, which consisted of all the varieties of game, poultry, pigs, and so forth, that could be collected by a wide and indiscriminate system of plunder. ”

“ I wonder how many people know how to cook and eat wild duck as they should be cooked and eaten—when they are plentiful, and when the man who shoots them is, in his way, a gourmet, and is yet living away from civilisation and restaurants? ”

“ My definition of man is, 'a Cooking Animal'. The beasts have memory, judgment and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook. The trick of the monkey using the cat's paw to roast a chestnut is only a piece of shrewd malice in that turpissima bestia, which humbles us so sadly by its similarity to us. ”

“ It is only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport. Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vegetables; but your violent fondness to change, and great eagerness after novelties, have prompted you to the destruction of animals without justice or necessity, perverted your nature, and warped your appetites which way soever your pride or luxury have called them. ”

“ No one can possibly wonder," I think I hear you say, "if the horse refuses to eat meat, and cares only for oats and hay, since it is its nature to do this." You are perfectly right, but mark this: there are human beings, and unfortunately they are very numerous, who, like this horse and other animals, maintain their position at the manger, and eat their hay and their oats, instead of cultivating an appetite for better food. ”

“ Among butchers, and those who qualify the different parts of an animal into food, it would be easy to select persons much further removed from those virtues which should result from reason, consciousness, sympathy, and animal sensations, than any savages upon the face of the earth. ”

“ He ate and drank with the deliberation and relish of a man who, without being exactly a gourmand, nevertheless counted the art of dining among the fine arts, and prided himself on being something of a connoisseur. ”

“ “It is a specious but very false reason to allege that, since man has acquired this taste, he ought to be permitted to indulge it—in the first place because Nature has not given him cooked flesh, and because several ages must have rolled away before fire was used. It is very well known that there are many countries in which it was not known at the period of their discovery. Nature, then, could have given man only raw or living flesh, and we know that it is repugnant to him over the whole extent of the earth. ”

“ Yes, the very fact that we do pursue such sports, and enjoy them, is an irrefragable answer. The principle of chase and taking of prey, which is impressed on almost all living things, [48] from the minutest insect to the lion of the African desert, is impressed with double force on man. By the strong dictates of our nature, by the very words of the Holy Scriptures, every creature is given us for food ”

“ There are who strive to stamp with disrepute
The luscious food, because it feeds the brute;
In tropes of high-strain’d wit, while gaudy prigs
Compare thy nursling man to pamper’d pigs;
With sovereign scorn I treat the vulgar jest,
Nor fear to share thy bounties with the beast. ”

“ And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb. ”

“ But man is a carnivorous production, And must have meals, at least one meal a day; He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction, But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey; Although his anatomical construction Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way, Your labouring people think beyond all question, Beef, veal, and mutton, better for digestion. ”

“ Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way,—as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn,—and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. ”

“ These creatures have danced all night, and eaten up a good portion of the rations, in spite of the fact that they knew a hard tramp lay before them to-day. How they will get through, or what we will do if they give out on the way, is the next thing for us to think of. ”

“ The Jackal Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow in the course of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration. ”

“ "What," said he, "makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporal necessities with myself; he is hungry and crops the grass, he is thirsty and drinks the stream, his third and hunger are appeased, he is satisfied and sleeps; he rises again and is hungry, he is again fed and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fulness. The intermediate hours are tedious and gloomy; ”

“ To the name "omnivorous," used not in the hoggish sense, but in this rational sense, and not excluding, as the scientists would absurdly make it exclude, the force of moral and other considerations, the vegetarian need raise no objection. Man is "omnivorous," is he? He may select his own diet from the vegetable and animal kingdoms? ”

“ Habits connected with matters of the table, as indeed with all sensuous enjoyments, should always be such as not to suggest to others ideas of merely selfish animal gratification. Among minor characteristics, few are so indicative of genuine good-breeding as a man's mode of eating. ”

“ There are more in the world than I who would know how to do nothing but eat it. If I had been a wild dog, used to the habits of savage life, I might have hunted down some smaller animal as wild as myself, torn it to pieces, and devoured it raw; but I was a civilised creature, so altered by education, that in my hunting days I always brought the game to my master instead of eating it myself; and here, on the London [Pg 71] high road, there was not even game to be caught. ”

“ I have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed their applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate and sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopt hay, with indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They neither grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice.
I am no Quaker at my food. ”

“ Sir, as concerns the first, we are accustomed to have many divers meats for our friends and kinsfolk, because some love one manner of meat, and some another, and we wish every man to be satisfied. Secondly, in regard of physic, because for divers maladies which people have, some men will eat one meat, and some another, it is desirable that everybody should be suited. ”

“ Yet there is still this difference between man and all other animals—he is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; ”

“ Let a haunch of venison represent the motive, and the keen appetite of health and exercise the impulse: then place the same or some more favourite dish, before the same man, sick, dyspeptic, and stomach-worn, and we may then weigh the comparative influences of motives and impulses. ”

“ The people then dance round them and feast and get drunk. When the flesh has decayed from the head, the man who cut it off takes it home and preserves it as a relic, while his companions do the same with the hands and the feet. ”

“ There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. ”