If you’re one of my regular readers (which I guess means I’m talking to myself), you may be aware that the article I wrote last week was about camels, specifically camels living in Australia.
The Tuesday before that article ran, I got my usual weekly phone call from opinion editor Harry Nelson asking what I was going to write about for the week, and I told him I was going to write about camels.
Instead of firing me on the spot, Harry actually sounded reasonably interested, especially when I told him that one million camels live in Australia. This made me happy. I thought to myself, “Maybe this is a better topic than I thought.”
The next day, after I submitted my article, Harry sent me a text message that read, “I totally thought you said ‘cannibals,’ not ‘camels.’ Now I’m kinda underwhelmed.”
Well, so much for having a good article topic. I ended up promising Harry I’d write about cannibals in Australia this week to make up for ruining The Reflector again. So, that said, I’d like to talk to you a little about Australian cannibals.
There aren’t any.
Or, more accurately, there aren’t any nowadays. Back in the day, eating people was all the rage among the Aboriginals, and then the Christians from Europe showed up and apparently didn’t like that very much. And so, it gradually faded out until the last recorded traces of it vanished in the late 20th century (or at least the last recorded traces that Google knows of, which is good enough for me).
So there you go – that covers pretty much everything you could ever want to know about modern-day cannibalism in Australia. But while we’re on that side of the world, let’s jump north a few thousand miles to the Philippines. There, much like in Australia, consuming human flesh has fallen out of vogue. But every once in a while, an otherwise functional member of society snaps and starts eating people. As my seventh grade science teacher used to say, there is always an exception. (Don’t think too hard about that sentence.)
In this case, the exception’s name is Jovencio Tuyor, someone who seemed like a fairly normal person up until about a month ago. And I’m going to tell you specifically what he’s been accused of doing in the next paragraph. It’s kind of gruesome, so feel free to just assume what he did wasn’t very nice and skip down two paragraphs. I’m perfectly cool with that.
Now, if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re interested in the details. (Have you ever considered therapy?) So here goes: Jovencio Tuyor was convicted of murdering and partially eating 16-year-old Rey Dadoles. Tuyor inflicted 22 stab wounds to Dadoles and carved out some flesh, including some of the victim’s ribs and one of his biceps. He took this meat and cooked it into a local dish called kinilaw, which he ate with some of his drinking buddies.
Now, aside from being appalling, Tuyor’s behavior is also – no, wait, appalling pretty much sums it up. Tuyor has admitted cannibalizing the victim, though he denies being responsible for the murder, despite an awful lot of contrary evidence. This seems a little perplexing to me. I mean, if you’re going to deny murdering the guy, then why are you conceding you ate him? I’m pretty sure the penalty for cannibalism is almost as harsh as the penalty for murder, maybe harsher.
And by that, I mean cannibalism is legal in the Philippines, provided the cannibal in question did not kill the person being cannibalized. This seems like a bit of an oversight on the part of the Philippine lawmakers.
Maybe I’m just being a typical ethnocentric American; I dunno. But I tend to look down on cannibalism regardless of the specifics. If you enjoy eating people, I’m probably not going to hang out with you, whether or not the people you eat die of natural causes.
In the Philippines’ defense, I guess I should mention the United States doesn’t have any laws specifically against cannibalism either. Usually whenever that kind of thing comes up, it’s treated as a case of defiling a corpse. Or perhaps as a case of murder, depending on how the perpetrator came into possession of a human body.
Philippine law is more lenient on the matter, but it definitely has some similarities. In a nutshell, as long as the cannibalism isn’t consensual, it’s pretty difficult to pull off legally, regardless of where you are.
So next time you get a craving for human flesh, you probably shouldn’t act on it. Just go to Taco Bell instead. I’ve never tried human flesh, but I’m pretty sure quesadillas are just as good and a lot more socially acceptable.
McNeill Williford is a senior majoring in industrial engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].