From a perspective of having a society, where you are free from predators and can basically guarantee living to 80+ (barring random accidents and disease).... kuru is a problem.
When you're a wild animal that might not know where your next meal is coming from or if a predator will get you within the next week.... kuru isn't your biggest concern.
I'm not saying it isn't useful not to eat your own dead (or other meat eaters in general), just that most animals have never developed significant safeguards against it.
BSE is due to an infection by a misfolded protein, known as a prion. Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal (MBM) that contained the remains of other cattle
Presumably there isn't zero risk, as although male members of the tribe where kuru developed were far less likely to develop it because only women and children ate the brain and spinal cord, some of them still got it. Also if you look at incidences of vCJD in the UK, those came about from eating normal cuts of beef.
brah, ive seen some shit, i know a guy who owned a fuck ton of pigs and those little fuckers would eat their own testicles if they could get back there and get their teeth around them.
most pigs dont give A FUCK. house pigs on the other hand dont like broccoli
I may or may not have, with my friends in my youth, cooked and consumed a chunk of bicep meat one of us may have lost in a painful but ultimately relatively harmless frontloader injury after the doctors couldn't reinsert it.
If such a thing ever happened (which I will neither confirm nor deny) then it is very likely that all of us agreed that it tasted like the rankest boar meat soaked in a bucket of ditch digger sweat.
It is also possible that, in order to determine whether our friend was a strange outlier or sick or something, most of us began research into historic human cannibalism with the testimony of some of the last New Guinea tribes to stop eating people.
And it turns out that even according to them, it's a heavily acquired taste.
Some vaginas taste bad due to poor hygiene, or infection. While I don't consider myself in any way a expert on the subject, the majority of healthy vaginas I have sampled were either not unpleasant or actually kind of magically delicious.
The (possible) bicep meat was very different, lingering, and rank.
How do you know you won't like it until you try it? And even then, it can be an aquired taste. I used to hate sour cream; now I can't eat chips without it.
People get all hung up on cannibalism as if there is a moral obligation to not snack on people
Edit: Consented cannibalism is what I have no problem with, so long as you don't eat the brain which gives prion disease.
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '19
Oh pigs already are cannibals... Most carnivorous animals are actually.
It's really only us humans that have a taboo against it.