TABOO: The Outcry Over Animals Being Fed Like Cannibals
If you search in the depths of the internet, you’ll eventually find things that make people really uncomfortable.
We got lost in those depths recently and stumbled upon this video of a pig being fed bacon. The video shows a person feeding a pig strips of bacon, and the pig unknowingly just chowed down the delicious bacon like anyone else would. There was no real context, it was just a somewhat-shocking video that you probably don’t see very often.
We thought it was interesting and posted it on the Foodbeast site. Immediately, a vicious debate ensued between those who called it “Forced cannibalism,” and those who didn’t think it was a big deal.
We got a ton of reaction from the post, from “Please take this down,” to “What the hell is wrong with you guys.”
.@foodbeast You should take this down. It's gross in the wrong way.
— Ben Leventhal (@benleventhal) July 14, 2015
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Seriously fuck this in so many ways https://t.co/pJlD1GNp74
— Karen Geier (@karengeier) July 14, 2015
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If anything, the post showed that people have really strong feelings about animals being fed their own species of animals, but we weren’t going to ignore this and act like it never happened. This kind of thing does happen, and for better or worse, it happens more often than you’d think.
Out of curiosity, I Googled “Chickens eating chicken” and quite a few videos popped up.
One video in particular featured a guy who fed his chickens rice with chicken skin. The guy sounded like he did it often and even went as far as saying:
“I get kind of a sick pleasure out of watching them eat the chicken skin.”
There are a hell of a lot of Google video results with chickens eating chicken nuggets, fried chicken, rotisserie chicken, you name it. The self-eating “pleasure,” as the guy in the video above said, has apparently crossed many minds before.
To complete the trifecta of meats, I Googled, “Cows eating beef,” and sure enough, there was a video of cows being fed beef patties:
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Some guy even tried feeding cows a McDonald’s burger. Comedian Nick Padula went to McDonald’s and Wendy’s, and picked up some hamburgers with the intention of feeding it to a couple of cows, but his attempt was lazy, at best.
Now all these videos consist of humans provoking the action, but animals actually eat their own quite often.
Wired had a nifty article pointing out cannibal animals, some, such as the sloth bear, even eat their own offspring.
It’s doubtful that PETA would stand outside of the bear’s cave, protesting how horrible it is for eating its kids (But it would make for hilarious video that everyone would watch).
There is something devious when it’s coming from a human mind, though.
I’ll never forget a quote from food psychologist Marc David. He told me during the California foie gras ban:
“That which is forbidden, or scary, automatically becomes compulsory to understand.”
In other words, whether it’s the people feeding the animals, curious to see if they’ll eat it, or us, the viewers, curious to see the videos, the “forbidden” aspect of it piques our interest.
This stuff might gross you out, it might make you laugh, or it might make you feel indifferent, but regardless of the feeling, there’s no doubt that it’ll draw you in and feed your curiosity.
