Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History

Content Warning: This section contains references to illness and death.

In 1985, veterinarians in England were puzzled by cows exhibiting erratic behavior, loss of coordination, and an inability to stand. The affected animals were put down and processed into animal byproducts, but by 1986, the British Ministry of Agriculture launched an investigation. Scientists discovered that the cows’ brains were riddled with holes, similar to Swiss cheese, a characteristic of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), a group of neurological diseases that included scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans. The newly identified disease in cows was named Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or “Mad Cow Disease” (244). By 1987, cases had spread widely across England, and while government officials reassured the public that eating beef was safe, some scientists suspected a connection between BSE and kuru, a fatal disease once prevalent among the Fore people of New Guinea.

Kuru, first observed by Western researchers in the 1950s, was characterized by tremors, muscle weakness, loss of coordination, and pathological laughter, leading to death. It primarily affected women and children, and researchers soon linked its spread to ritual cannibalism, in which the Fore consumed the bodies of deceased relatives as a way of “honoring their dead” (246).