Sins of the flesh

Bill Schutt has an excellent subject, and he explores it from a promising angle. Cannibalism has long interested zoologists, anthropologists, historians, criminologists, literary theorists and students of theology and blasphemy — the absurd claim that Roman Catholics were commending it in their account of transubstantiation was a favourite with 18th-century English blasphemers. Few people have tried to bring all these together, and perhaps by the end we have to conclude that there is not much connecting the very different elements at the remote ends of the scale. Still, it was worth a try.

Schutt is an animal scientist, and he begins with the simpler organisms. At the bottom of the scale, cannibalism in invertebrates is actually quite common for particular purposes. There are mother spiders who present themselves to their young to be eaten once their purpose has been served. In snails it is a passing phase; under a certain age, snails will eat their own eggs and lettuce indiscriminately before eating only plants.

The freshwater fish Cichlidae breed their young in their mouths, and often eat a good proportion of them. They need to strike a balance. Fish can produce a huge number of eggs — up to 300 million in some species — which ought to make it possible to be generous in expenditure and to eat some of these high-protein emissions. If the fish eats too many, however — over 80 per cent, for instance — then it seems to make more sense to eat the rest rather than devote energy to bringing up the few remaining.

Different sorts of cannibalism are recorded among animals. The eating of young — filial cannibalism — goes alongside sibling cannibalism, or the eating of rivals. This is memorably described in Ted Hughes’s poem about the pike, with its mysterious reduction of the number of pike in a tank, until suddenly there is only one, ‘with a sag belly and the grin it was born with’.