Cultural Differences

[q99]

The webcomic City of Reality has just come back from a season break, and it has a new page I just had to share :)


The Utopia-esque city of Reality has recently broken a long period of relative isolation, one of the effects of which was an 'alliance' with the Dragons of Darkworld.



Well, sounds fair to me!

Comments

[freezer]

It's a testament to the unflappabilty of Reality's population that they can take this request without rioting or even a "What the hell?!"

[q99]

You can see in Todo and AV's eyes that they're thinking it, though ^^

[leoboiko]

As a consumer of corpses of living beings that didn’t even want to die to feed me, I see no rational reason to be outraged at this. Feel free to eat my corpse, nice dragons!

[q99]

Dragon Industries appreciates your tasty body!

[psychopathicus_rex]

The main cultural difference here, I would imagine, is one of a race of carnivores dealing with a race of... what's the term... omnivarians? Omnivorous people, anyway. To a carnivore, a dead body is just one thing - FOOD. They may or may not eat their own dead, but they see nothing whatsoever unusual about eating other people's dead - that's what the dead are FOR, right? What's the big deal?
We, on the other hand, are somewhat more persnickety about such things. Given that we can, if we wish, live entirely on plants, bodies can mean anything from 'oh, fresh pork' to 'remains of our dear Aunt Beulah, may she rest in peace'. In this instance, strict logic dictates that the dragons are right, but the standards of our own culture (which Reality presumably copies to some degree), with its attendant funeral industries and taboos against cannibalism, state that they are wrong - truly, monstrously wrong. Who's right? Difficult to say, really.

[q99]

I think it has more to do with differences in social nature, dead carnivores who work in packs often won't eat their fallen.

Or it might also be a hunter vs scavenger thing, or similar.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Well, yes, unless they're zombies, I would think so.
You're talking about carnivores as animals, though - carnivores that have evolved into a civilization may well have different priorities from both their animal progenitors and other types of intelligent beings. After all, we're descended from apes, and share a number of similarities with them, but we're still very different from them.

[q99]

Still, the difference between an omnivore and a carnivore is simply omnivores eat more, but in terms of predatory behavior they can be quite similar.

I think it's their practical outlook that has more to do with it than omnivore vs carnivore.

[psychopathicus_rex]

To some degree, yes - I'm just saying that omnivores have more opportunity to be sentimental about such things than carnivores, because we've got more options. If there's no meat to be had, we can generally make do on other things. This gives us the luxury of being able to classify meat in various ways, from consumable to icky to taboo to even think about. Carnivores, on the other hand, have nothing BUT meat, and they can't afford even a trace of sentiment about it - it's there to be consumed, period. They run out of meat, they run out of food; that's that. The one good reason to not eat your own dead, going by that logic, is that too much of such behavior gives you nasty diseases - otherwise, they just see dead bodies as meals that've stopped moving, and while they'll shy away from their own dead, they can't see why anyone else would mind them eating theirs.

[q99]

A well-adapted predator generally won't have scarcity concerns that often, not outside extreme situations. Real carnivores don't, carnivores that are smart too would have it even less-so.

Also note the smaller Nymph-class Dragon there at the end. They aren't all big eaters.

[psychopathicus_rex]

It wasn't so much 'scarcity concerns' that I was talking about as a basic view of things - whether you have lots of meat to eat or not, you're still going to view it strictly as 'meat' if it's your only option.

[q99]

But, again, real carnivores *don't* if they're social types.

[psychopathicus_rex]

They don't eat their own dead, no, but that's more because of practical considerations than not - there are nasty brain-rotting diseases that come from eating too much of your own species, and there's probably an instinct hardwired into wolves and the like that just tells them no, eating your dead packmate would probably NOT be a good idea. There'd be no such reasons stopping them from eating other people's dead, and with only practicality keeping them from devouring their own, they probably wouldn't be able to comprehend why others would perceive their proposal as monstrous.