>>941456215
The common defense against cannibalism that I often hear is probably the one I consider most irrational by the people who posit it: due to the risks inherent of cannibalism, especially prion diseases, we ought not commit to it. This frankly seems untrue within the worldview this is typically posed from, as that risk is *miniscule* alongside extant practices.
A neat fact, replicated among both cannibalist non-human and human populations, is that disease models generally show that "group cannibalism by multiple individuals on one victim is a necessary (albeit not always sufficient) precondition for disease spread through cannibalism." [Antonovics 2007] That is, as long as we enforce an injective function mapping the set of cannibals to the set of corpses, the prion spread would be self-extinguishing. There would *passively* be no risk of an epidemic, before even considering the same best practices we do with bovine to prevent the spread of Creutzfeldt-Jakobs Disease today to minimize prion risk. If to within that same standard beef is considered properly safe for consumption, I am not sure how human meat is not. Especially when we look at raw numbers here, consider the *raw* risk of a few extra thousand deaths as a physical maximum possible worst case scenario where transmission skyrockets to 100%. We're comparing that to the set of zoonotic diseases, which account for 50% of all diseases and 70% of emergent ones, such as Avian Flu and COVID-19. In terms of safety and relevant threat, I'm really not sure how cannibalism could be condemned if we're not willing to condemn many other types of cuisine.
