Cannibalism and blood drinking

[strange]

I wrote the following post back on the other board but no one has really answered it yet and I think it is about to be shuffled aside and lost, so I'll post it here. In relation to discussing some physical and personal details about Gall I had this to say to SteveWilk of the other board..

"I can certainly agree with the 5'7" estimate. Thats about how he looks in the loin cloth photo I have and that picture is one of the only full body shots of him. I estimated his athletic weight to be at least 190-220 pounds when he appears more in shape. In the loin cloth photo he sports a bad pot belly and some budding cankles which are very consistent with your account of his obesity.

I hope this does not sound rude, but has Gall ever consumed human flesh or drank human blood? I hear some Indians are involved with that sort of thing and I've been keeping a mental note of cannibalistic leaning persons and their body shapes as they age. I can even ask if he ever simply ate any rare meat, or drank animal blood.
Gall has some puffyness that reminds me of people with the above habits. Orson Welles simply ate a lot of rare steaks and has also flopped around with occult persons and rituals, Idi Amin has definitely drank blood from animals and people and is also rumored to have eaten people (the blood drinking has witnesses and is also part of African culture, particularly that of his mother who was a witch), and a lot of these guys suffered some uncanny weight problems that struck them in their old age. A major contrast to their once powerful bodies and a peculiar way of aging (since most people don't really BALLOON by hundreds of pounds as they get extremely old, its a bit unusual to have 70-80 year old men weighing as much as 3-400 pounds). There's also a few other people who I've followed in these traits and I'm very curious if the puffing is common among cannibals or people with cannibalistic tendencies or people who eat rare meat."

I'd still like to find out if Gall had any of the above tendencies, either as a tribal custom or a simple personal habit that would be embraced by other indians.

Strange

[joewiggs]

Strange, now that's an interesting topic I must say. I do not know enough to answer your question to satisfy all the points you make but, I can say this; it was a custom among the Sioux to eat the,sometimes still pulsating, heart of the buffalo they killed. Doing so was a maneer pf sharing the great "heart" of the sacred animal and, showing respect as well. However, I can think of no acts of cannibalism committed by the Sioux.

One story that got around after the battle was that an angry Indian father who lost a son in the battle butchered one of the soldiers who, apparently, was rather hefty. Sometime later, while sitting around the campfire roasting meat, some Cheyennes asked the father to share his roasted repast with them. The father replied sure, it is the meat of the soldier Wacishu! Of course it was not.

As for Gall, he suffered the same dietetic problems that many Sioux shared;meat lovers supreme. They seldom ate anything else and, for sure , this habit would cause one to blow up in the later years!

[tbw]

Interesting topic strange. Its a wonder it didn't elicit a better response from those who've seen combat and should have the stomach for such topics, but who knows???

I doubt if meat itself it fattening. Its rich in proteins and hasn't a drop of carbs in it. Contrary to popular belief it isn't caloric intake that makes one fat, its the carbohydrates one eats that does. Most cereal grains and fruits and even most veggies are high in carbs.

One's body converts carbs into sugars. If you eat sugar and are eating a high carb diet, all those sugars are stored as "fat" that are not used. Thus the 'doctors' advice to 'exercise'. Thus cutting 'sugar' alone will not produce the desired results in a diet.''

I think many meat eaters, read that cannibals that i've seen are pretty slim, (Papua New Guinea comes to mind), as well as a few other Nat'l. Geo.'s that i've seen. None were 'fat'.

[Cutter]

Human beings have been doing crap to each other forever and a day. It's a question of degree I guess.
Wooden leg thought nothing of removing the liver of an old man. Then there's the sound of "popping" when scalping someone. The cutting off of everything, and putting said thing every where else. It's been done.
It wouldn't be a surprise that cannibalism was in the mix, white folks did it with the Donner party.
No one is exclusive.

[strange]

Meat is perfectly alright. I was speaking of rare meat, or raw meat. There's certain things that might happen if you eat it that way. I'm not a vegetarian. The main subject was cannibalism but I also spoke of ordinary meat served raw and rare because those are also associated with various tribal rituals or celebrations around the world. And as of now, I'm not precisely sure if my theory of ballooning applies to basic blood drinkers or blood eaters or whether it also or alternatively a cannibal thing.

I may have to scrap my theory altogether, but it still does good to sniff around and maybe give people a couple more good reasons not to eat each other. A three hundred pound Indian is very unusual to me because the amount of food for a regular person to get up to that size is quite a lot. It sounds kinda like a "glandular" thing, although I'm not sure if that is the correct term. And I was thinking up some possible reasons and similar persons to try and find out if there are any interesting reasons for the effect.

As you say though (and what I can dig up just by searching the internet for cannibals) it seems that they come in normal sizes, often rather thin actually (at least for the serial killers). Right now I'm sorta ignoring that fact because many of these serial killers were also impoverished and youthful. My theory is that there is a possible ballooning that strikes cannibals in their later years as they age, and when they are not "poverty stricken".

But naturally, I could be talking out of my rear.

Strange

[tbw]

Jack, you may say some pretty Strange things sometimes as "some people" might interpret that, but, let me be the first to assure you that you are not one of those who "talks out their rear." I find that usually, if not often your insights are, as some would say, 'right on'. Your 'out of the box' thinking on a lot of things takes many people by surprise. Sometimes they don't see the relevance to the subject or the topic until they are blind sided by it. Unfortunately many times 'subjects' or 'topics' not discussed can and often does lead to nowhere.

Back to the topic at hand...

Personally I find it rather disturbing that a few societies today engage in ritual or not, insanely profuse "blood drinking" - as if it was sport. Even in many cultures "blood pudding" seems to be some kind of delicacy that needs an acquired taste, one would think. Of course there are a few examples where 'man vs. wild' has provided us with gory scenes and examples where 'survival' enters the mind. One would think, if this was done on a daily basis, eating raw snakes, lizards, 'you name it' that the example should be set, of course, the question you ask may be best answered in that case in about another 40 years.

To be perfectly honest, I think the answer to your question may be lost in some college or university paper, where research was done on the topic and neatly tucked away in some drawer never to see the light of day. Now, you've got me searching through old Natgeo's to see if I can spot "old fat cannibals" just to see if your theory is "right". Damn Jack, why couldn't you have asked a question about whether or not Benteen's horse or Benteen himself had hemorrhoids and that was the real cause of his dawdling. I could see the headlines in that breaking story today. But, to be fair.... "what if"?

[stumblingbear]

Strange, you are "strange" but, not in a bad way!

I guess it got started when hunger was intense and the person who felt it was unable to hunt! What do you do! I read somewhere that starving to death is horrible!

[whitebull]

How did we get on this topic?