He has a special need for validity and shows no sense of guilt. An investigator at the time told BILD: 'Armin Meiwes shows no kind of crime processing in detention. He unsuccessfully applied for probation in December 2017. Now Meiwes has been described as a 'friendly, outgoing, polite' prisoner who reads, helps other prisoners with the typewriter, goes to church services and works in the laundry. There had been a legal argument over whether killing a willing victim counted as murder. 3, 2003Īt his retrial a psychologist stated that Meiwes could re-offend and still 'had fantasies about devouring the flesh of young people'.
CRAIGSLIST CANNIBAL LOOKING FOR WILLING VICTIM TRIAL
Thanks also to reader Stephen Roddick for asking the question.Meiwes (then 42, right) talks to his lawyer Harald Ermel as he faces trial for murder at the regional court in Kassel, Germany, Wednesday, Dec. Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.Įxplainer thanks Raymond Coppinger, co-author of Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution. Behaviorists point out that dogs are more aggressive in packs (PDF), with more timid individuals joining in after their peers launch attacks on humans. emergency rooms for dog bites every day, and more than half of those attacks occur at home.įinally, it’s noteworthy that there were seven man-eating dogs in the Saskatchewan home, rather than a single pet. Epidemiology studies also undermine the desire to believe that Fido would never turn on us. The victims are often afflicted with diabetes, which causes numbness in the feet, and they can’t feel the dog gnawing at them. There are many reports of dogs eating the wounded toes of family members.
Some dogs don’t even wait until their masters die to dig in. It’s likely that these canine garbage-compactors treated corpses like any other waste product. Humans, the story goes, realized this was rather useful, and let the least aggressive pups hang around. Proto-dogs scavenged around the outskirts of human settlements about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, removing food scraps, feces, and other human waste. Your feline friends are no better.)ĭogs that eat their master’s corpses are just fulfilling their evolutionary duty.
There have been several news stories of dogs scavenging family members, and other cases go unreported in the press.
Modern dogs exhibit the same behavior, and many have eaten their fallen masters. Some Muslim communities in East Africa revile dogs because they believe that canines ate the body of the Prophet Muhammad. There are even a few secular historians who believe that Jesus’ body was eaten by dogs, and that his acolytes fabricated the story of a reverential entombment as a sort of coping mechanism. There is evidence that ancient Romans considered the low-hanging cross a crueler form of crucifixion than the high version, because it enabled dogs to rip the body apart. Dogs consumed the body of Jezebel, a princess in the Old Testament, after her defenestration. In The Iliad, Homer makes nine references to dogs eating dead bodies. Many cultures consider dogs unclean precisely because of their tendency to scavenge our remains. Dogs are perfectly willing to eat human corpses, and there’s no evidence that they treat their masters differently than any other dead body. So, is the folk wisdom that a cat will gladly eat its dead owner, but a dog would sooner starve, just bunk? After a Canadian couple died in their rural Saskatchewan home, their seven dogs subsisted for more than a week by eating their remains.