biolog

I venture to say it does, and I think Spain would agree. As a side note, Christopher Columbus, a Spaniard, referred to the Caribs as canibalis, a derivative of which was used as the half brute, half human spawn of a witch in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Caliban was a debauch and drunkard who mistook man for god.

The technical term intraspecific predation can still be reserved for describing within species dining. However, cannibalism, I think, grants me slightly more leeway. According to the Random House dictionary, cannibalism means “the eating of the flesh of an animal by another animal of its own kind.” Are not primates and non-human primates of the same kind?

The impetus for all this is a new study presented at the International Primatological Society conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Apparently, hunting our fellow primates for food is driving them to extinction.

Russell A. Mittermeier, chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Primate Specialist Group, said that along with habitat destruction, “in many places, primates are quite literally being eaten into extinction.”