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Your classification of honorable/dishonorable is totally foreign to me. Out of all the animals you list, I would have classified dolphins as the most "honorable". Is there really a major culture/ethnicity that thinks eating dolphins is okay but eating octopus is bad? It's hard for me to imagine.
Dolphins practise gang rape.
I second @4bpp - this anthropomorphising of animals is and pretty much always will be extremely suspect. Mallards are one of these infamous species that supposedly participate in gang rapes - several males will pursue a female and attempt to forcibly mate with her, and as a result males' penises can shoot out with surprising speed, whereas females' vaginas will be corkscrew-shaped so as to make it more difficult to mate. Clearly something to feel disgusted about, right?
Except that female mallards actually covertly elicit this behaviour by intentionally flying over the territory of other males and initiating a chase, drumming up a fight over her, and the corkscrew turns of female mallards' vaginas actually are meant to let her influence the males which get to fertilise her egg.
Do mallards deserve death for this? Does the concept of "rape trauma" exist in such a species? Should the very emotionally-laden human concept of rape even apply? If it doesn't, how can you even tell what is rape and what is not in the animal kingdom? Animals in many cases are basically alien species and should be treated as such.
I don't know, but it makes me feel a whole lot better about ordering the Peking duck.
Thoroughly unbased, you don't need a moral excuse to order Peking duck. It's delicious! I would eat a human if it tasted like Peking duck.
Still, I think the point stands - animals can't be anthropomorphised so easily, and behaviour that's aesthetically displeasing to us as humans can't necessarily be judged as immoral within its context.
Cannibals from Papua New Guinea tell us that human flesh tastes just like pork. "Long pork", if you will. I like bacon, and I'm not averse to alternative sources. Maybe lab-grown meat will let me have a me-burger, kinda removed the ethical downsides.
It's been done! Multiple times, even.
Though I'm tickled by the implication that the safest place in the world from cannibals is the Middle East.
Boo. Doesn't count! Especially with the name "Foot", how did they screw up so badly?
The second example does. I know of a senior doctor who, in his wilder days, swallowed an entire placenta raw on a dare. He won about the equivalent of $10, which is far less than I'd charge in all honesty.
I watched the program when it came out, I really thought I remembered him eating it but I guess not.
This used to be a granola girl thing, didn't it? Recreating every part of a natural birth and stuff. Apparently it's quite good for the mother.
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