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[Renew Deal]

This message was self-deleted by its author (Renew Deal) on Tue Jan 19, 2016, 09:57 PM. When the original post in a discussion thread is self-deleted, the entire discussion thread is automatically locked so new replies cannot be posted.

[femmocrat]

1. Why is it serious?

Is someone actually proposing this?

[Renew Deal]

2. Yes

On DU at least.

[femmocrat]

3. Guess I missed that.

Fortunately.

[demmiblue]

5. So, this is a meta thread?

Shite, at least let us read the offending post.

[Renew Deal]

10. It's not offending

I don't know if this is a popular opinion or not. I didn't include the thread because I didn't want to pick on anyone. It is this one:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1228&pid=44612

[kcr]

73. I think that's a riff off the old joke that your cat would eat you if you died

I don't think they meant pet food.

[snooper2]

8. well, eventually we run out of space for graveyards

[yeoman6987]

28. So what. Giving animals human bodies is not appropriate

[Lancero]

33. And giving them the bodies of other organic creatures is?

Meats meat.

Unless you're trying to say that feeding them meat is inappropriate, in that case I wish you luck in your efforts to turn cats Vegan.

[jberryhill]

59. Why?

Tibetans are not appropriate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

Sky burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་, Wylie: bya gtor, lit. "bird-scattered"[1]) is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar. The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds. Comparable practices are part of Zoroastrian burial practices where deceased are exposed to the elements and birds of prey on stone structures called Dakhma

[Coventina]

4. Could you point to the thread in question?

This is truly bizarre.

[Renew Deal]

12. ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1228&pid=44612

[Coventina]

18. Interesting. There is a tradition in Buddhism for such a thing.

It was considered a final act of generosity to leave your body for wild animals to scavenge, rather than be cremated.

I think that person was talking about their own remains, not making pet food on an industrial scale.

[demmiblue]

19. Interesting factoid... thanks. n/t

[bvf]

22. That *is* interesting! n/t

[Mike__M]

23. Feeding wild animals is one thing

being fed to pets and domesticated animals is something else.

[Coventina]

24. Agreed. But, the basic concept is similar.

I don't think it's a good idea, because such a system on an industrial scale would be an invitation to all kinds of nightmarish abuses.

[Shandris]

39. And on a spiritual level, the thought is abhorrent on that scale. For those concerned...

..about such things, of course; I recognize most DU'ers aren't, but still it is a consideration.

[Coventina]

63. Well, but generosity is a spiritual practice for Buddhists.

Hence how the tradition arose.

[FrodosPet]

47. I would be fine with having my remains eaten by wild animals

I won't need them anymore. So why should my delicious corpse be locked in a box or burned up into inedible ashes?

Pet cats, dogs, and door buzzards, I would not want them to get a taste for human flesh. But racoons, opossums, beetles, turkey vultures, etc... have at it!

[pokerfan]

60. One's remains are going to be consumed one way or another

Be it bacteria or more complex animals. Even in the case of cremation and scattered ashes you will be providing food for plants. I'm not particularly sentimental about all this. It's just the part of the circle of life.

[jberryhill]

57. Google "sky burial"

There are many cultures in which the dead have been left to feed animals.

Do you:

(a) want to be pumped full of poison and sealed in a box, or
(b) have your physical legacy remain part of what is alive?

There is a "natural burial" movement in which the idea is to be plant food. Animals eat plants.

What is the "non bizarre" way of disposing of human remains? What is the "natural" way of doing it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

Sky burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་, Wylie: bya gtor, lit. "bird-scattered"[1]) is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar. The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds. Comparable practices are part of Zoroastrian burial practices where deceased are exposed to the elements and birds of prey on stone structures called Dakhma.

[Coventina]

64. Yes, please see my reply #18

What I considered "bizarre" was the idea of doing it on an industrial scale for the purposes of making commercial pet food.

[global1]

6. Another Step Closer To Soylent Green.....nt

[99Forever]

7. ...

[Godhumor]

11. What do you know???? Who told you that I...I mean, no. I wouldn't do that.

Never.


Honest.

[Renew Deal]

15. lol

[whatthehey]

13. Sure. Meat is meat

Note I am working under the assumptions that this would be after natural death and with hygienic processing. I would probably balk at humans raised for slaughter.

[Renew Deal]

16. lol

[PasadenaTrudy]

14. Only for the door buzzard n/t

[Renew Deal]

17. Naturally

[Kalidurga]

54. That is what I was gonna say

although if I am old enough and I die at home and I have a pet cat or dog there is the possibility I will have no say in the matter.

[kentauros]

56. I suspect the door buzzard takes a bite every now and then

[niyad]

20. a scene in "fried green tomatoes" comes to mind.

[fleur-de-lisa]

31. Also kind of reminds me of a scene in Bridget Jones's Diary . . .

At the beginning when she gets drunk and imagines dying alone and being eaten by her cats . . . that will probably be me!

[Yo_Mama]

21. Especially not to the door buzzard. She might get a taste for it, and then my callers would

start mysteriously disappearing.

Beware the buzzard.

[ShrimpPoboy]

25. No

And I would be surprised if it wasn't illegal to do so.

[Xyzse]

26. Wait what?

I must not be reading this correctly...
Huh?

I am still too taken aback to answer.
Thankfully I have no pets.

[LisaL]

27. The idea is just sick.

[whatthehey]

29. Can someone explain in non-emotional terms the problem?

Shorthand things like "icky" or "disrespectful" don't tell me why it is to be described as such.

Remember we are talking about dead bodies used for food, not living humans killed for food. Religious (majority at least) or secular, for different reasons, agree that what is important in the human has either ceased functioning or transcended to an eternal resting place by the time the body is...a body. Nobody sane thinks the body can feel pain at being eaten. And everybody older than a small child knows that if the body is disposed of as they normally are, that means they either rot to be eaten by lower life forms than pets, or are burned and shattered to dust along with packaging and accoutrements. Not exactly any more pleasant fates than being Fido fodder. Why is being processed through a dog worse than processed through bacteria or worms, or scooped up with a bunch of processed fiber into an urn?

[LanternWaste]

34. Social mores.

Social mores.

Though there's a good biological reason why cannibalism is taboo in virtually every culture: Eating other humans can make you sick (prions, trichinosis, as well as many blood born pathogens). Additionally, sociologist/author Peggy Sanday writes that out a group of 156 cultures she looked at distributed evenly geographically and across time some form of cannibalism was present in three... two in times of famine, the third cultures used it for ritual only. A culture that eats people isn't going to get very far, evolutionarily speaking. Think about the "use cases" for and against cannibalism.

Of course, there's an issue of lively debate as to whether we can isolate human behaviors to such a degree that we can speculate on the selective pressures that led to them. My personal take is that I don't think we can develop evolutionary models of human behavior lacking either specific gene sequences or related hominid species. And any experiment to test the genetic variance of a cannibalism taboo is likely to be highly unethical. Eating people who just keeled over is a good way to pick up whatever caused them to die. Eating your healthy neighbors makes about as much sense as stealing from them. That sort of thing gets you kicked out of the tribe. Eating enemy tribes is an option, but tends to involve warfare against enemy tribes. It's a bit dicey.

This, of course, is also possibly dependent on a bunch of handwavium as to exactly what behaviors are selected for, and how much hereditibility there might be associated with it within a given social context. Which is why I'm generally skeptical of evolutionary psychology beyond the principle that primates can be utter assholes when they find it convenient.

ETA: Cannibalism as defined by sociologists, which is not merely human eating human as food for the tribe, but also humans using human as food for the tribe and/or the domesticated scavengers (dogs, larger cats, etc.) associated with it.

[whatthehey]

41. Cannibalism? I love dogs, but they are not human and, Korea aside, not food

Now social mores are in play yes, but that's just sticking a nicer label on "ooh icky".

I'm genuinely curious about why burial rituals and "respect" for the dead up to and including worship became such a nigh-universal human norm over the last 35,000 years or so. On the surface it's easy to say "religion says humans are special", but that begs the question why worms eating our bodies is more religiously...well, kosher than dogs eating us. The Parsis seem ok with wild animals of course, but few people seem ok with pets and it's not like there are billions of Parsis.

To me feeding human bodies to animals which are directly useful to us makes more selective sense than feeding them to worms, and there aren't too many domesticated carnivores/omnivores. Feeding us to pigs we later eat might potentially risk some prion issues but even if plausible now, that would have been hard to work out in prehistoric times unless they had some seriously imaginative trials established.

There must be some reason for why such things arose. It may IMO have been a result of becoming gregarious in both larger and more static groups. While civilization started millennia after burial rituals, human population was already becoming more concentrated, not because of population pressure but because of selection of better feeding/hunting areas and the better success of larger groupings. What that meant is that more people in your "in-group" not only died per se, but died in areas where you were going to be hanging around for a while. Since, while there is no way to know, it seems reasonable that human brain power was developed enough to understand kinship with ingroup members, it was probably distasteful to see your brother/friend/"neighbor" putrefying and being fought over by animals. The ways to get rid of them more neatly and quickly were going to devolve pretty quickly to burying, burning or disposal in moving/deep water. Obviously speculative, but given the timing it seems to make some sense to me at any rate.

[Mariana]

44. I bet it came along with belief in an afterlife.

Even today, there are religious people who believe the physical bodies of the dead will be resurrected one day and "reoccupied", if you like, by the souls that once inhabited them.

[anigbrowl]

69. Or some judgement-day resurrection; a few Christian sects are historically against cremation .nt

[LiberalElite]

71. I'm not sure but it's also not permitted in

Judaism.

[jberryhill]

55. The practical problem is secondary to what you are saying

Basically, there are ethical issues that arise from providing economic incentives to kill people.

Auntie has a degenerative disease which will cause her to lose a lot of weight before she goes. Meanwhile, Purina is paying by the pound.

As a purely practical matter, I agree with you that there is no issue.

Many people prefer natural burials - e.g. Neil DeGrasse Tyson - because they WANT their remains to be recycled into the food chain. He has stated that he wants to be buried as-is, without cremation or embalming, in order to feed the plants.

So, Tyson wants to be plant food. Presumably, an animal might eat the resulting plants, and so on...

[snooper2]

76. far as I know as long as you cook meat to the proper temp. it's good to go!

[Vinca]

30. I'd be afraid my cats might get teabagger in a can. Yeccchhhh.

[B2G]

32. Sure. My pup thinks I'm delicious. nt

[meow2u3]

35. I wouldn't feed human remains to my cat

But I might feed a few Yeehawdists to a grizzly or a lion.

[FLPanhandle]

36. Protein is protein

The human can be consumed by worms or bacteria or a pet. Who cares?

[LanternWaste]

40. The law... to be disregarded as one's own leisure.

"Who cares?"

In addition to social mores, the legal codes of the vast majority of nations, tribes and cultures from the copper age to the present day... laws to be disregarded at one's own leisure and convenience. I *think* that's a small list of "who cares". Which to me, at least) seems to begs the question: who exactly would deny those social mores and laws, and to what absolute purpose?

[FLPanhandle]

42. Many laws and social mores of a vast majority of nations, tribes, and cultures forbade homosexuality

Emotionally, no one would go for allowing human remains to be put to some useful purpose.

Logically, there is no good reason not to leverage an abundant resource.

[restorefreedom]

37. too many drugs and meds in most humans

i don't think it would be safe for consumption.

[Renew Deal]

43. Would you be OK if the food came from Organic Free Range humans?

[restorefreedom]

45. in theory, i don't hsve an issue with willed body programs

in practice i have concerns. even without drugs, human meat is not the natural diet of small companion animals. it would likely be healthier than the dregs and the four d's from big ag thoughh. but how would it be implemented? who would handle the retrieval and would the bodies be treated with respect? (i have the same concern about non humans but i know how they are treated). how would we separate the free range non medicated humans from the rest? what if people lie? would this lead to poor treatment decisions of the old and infirm in order to get more "raw materials" more quickly?

i know there is a lot there, its mostly rhetorical to demonstrate that such an idea, while very ecologically minded, is fraught with potential difficulties.

[NightWatcher]

38. And give my cat Pinky the taste for human flesh?

Shirley you can't be serious.

[closeupready]

46. Don't Zoroastrians do something like that?

Leaving the bodies of their dead out in the open for vultures to feed upon?

Anyway, no, I would feed my pets human flesh.

[Recursion]

74. Ah, you beat me to it

But it's not in the open, it's in an open-roofed tower. There's one about a mile south of me and buzzards circle it all the time.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

48. I was juror #3.

AUTOMATED MESSAGE: Results of your Jury Service
On Wed Jan 6, 2016, 04:57 PM an alert was sent on the following post:

Would you feed pet food made of human remains to your pets (cats, dogs, door buzzard, etc.)?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027504665

REASON FOR ALERT

This post is disruptive, hurtful, rude, insensitive, over-the-top, or otherwise inappropriate.

ALERTER'S COMMENTS

This OP is in very poor taste.

You served on a randomly-selected Jury of DU members which reviewed this post. The review was completed at Wed Jan 6, 2016, 05:28 PM, and the Jury voted 1-6 to LEAVE IT.

Juror #1 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: This may be a weird question - but this is a message board. *Shrug*
Juror #2 voted to HIDE IT
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: Tasted fine to me.
Juror #4 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: No explanation given
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: We need a good laugh
Juror #7 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE
Explanation: Is this alert for real? The thought of Nine Lives being made from nine humans cracks me up.

Thank you very much for participating in our Jury system, and we hope you will be able to participate again in the future.

[Renew Deal]

50. It is in poor taste, but 17% think it's a good idea

[Recursion]

49. The Parsi community does that with their birds

They practice a form of burial where bodies are left in an open-roofed tower and birds are allowed to eat the flesh off the remains; the bones are later put in an ossuary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence

Since large raptors are oftwn driven away from urban areas, in cities they keep a roost of hawks to do that.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

51. I expect that if I fall down the stairs and break my neck

that will happen anyhow because my cats can't open cans.

[jberryhill]

52. A qualified yes, but...

Are they from humanely-killed cage-free humans?

[hunter]

53. I'm more partial to the plant food proposals.

But the big problem with humans is that we are full of toxic crap, especially if we died in the hospital from diseases typically treated with powerful drugs, or from other medical things like radioactive pellets, dental fillings, pacemakers, and so on.

Human bodies also accumulate other toxins from the environment like DDE, PCB, Dioxins, lead, mercury, and many sorts of viruses, prions...

[CharlotteVale]

58. Animals eating humans doesn't bother me, but I am not

opening a can of it. Ewwwwwww.

[LiberalArkie]

61. Will the cans be labeled as non-tea-party or free-range-good -person?

[temporary311]

62. Only if they're free range humans. No cube rats.

[madinmaryland]

65. SOYLENT GREEN!!

IT'S PEOPLE!!!

[pinboy3niner]

67. *snort*

[hobbit709]

68. When I'm dead I will have no use for my body.

[anigbrowl]

70. Been doing so for years

[geomon666]

72. If it was healthy for my pet.

Sure.

[pinboy3niner]

75. Which particular humans are we talking about here?

[Renew Deal]

80. We'll start in the Lounge.

[JonathanRackham]

77. Don't get stewed up over this poll.

[hunter]

78. Most human meat is pretty toxic.

Lead, mercury, PCBs, DDE, Dioxins, toxic drugs, incredibly robust viruses...

Bad meat.

Probably even bad plant food.

Which is why I think we should all be buried in memorial forests.

...wouldn't it be wonderful if every community had a memorial forest?

Tear down and recycle some shopping center and parking lot, a golf course or two, start putting people who have passed away in holes with trees planted on top of them.

A hundred year cycle ought to do the trick; new corpses and new trees blended in with the old.

It could be a very beautiful place.

[Buzz Clik]

79. Is it nutritious? I understand it tastes like pork (the other white meat)

[Agnosticsherbet]

81. Would you feed the remains of your pets to your guests for dinner?

[laundry_queen]

82. I'm surprised practical issues of disease haven't been mentioned

If Rover can't catch whatever bizarre contagious disease Aunt Agnes had (that can survive routine sterilization and contaminate a million bags of food), maybe YOU can.

[dilby]

83. If I died I would not mind if my dog ate me.

Circle of life, I can be plant fertilizer or dog food makes no difference to me I am dead.

[LeftyMom]

84. People were going to eat my dog.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dogs-rescued-from-Korean-meat-farm-brought-to-SF-6146170.php

[pinboy3niner]

86. Ugh, disgusting! How can you even think of serving that without condorments?

And besides, they're upside-down. You know buzzards prefet to eat butt first. Sheesh!