"Keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men"

Man-eating is in the news! For instance, your dogs would eat your dead, or even not-quite-dead, body:

Some dogs don't even wait until their masters die to dig in. There are many reports of dogs eating the wounded toes of family members. The victims are often afflicted with diabetes, which causes numbness in the feet, and they can't feel the dog gnawing at them.

And hunger, as it turns out, extends to cats, who have been known "[to eat] the foot of an elderly man found dead with his mother." Both links via Alan, who remarked, "god, i love these stories about pets eating dead owners."

Possibly of comparable grossness is this story (via the Rumpus) about gelatin made from human collagen. A little disappointingly, no cadavers are harmed in this process... It turns out that the appeal of human collagen has to do with avoiding liability of the mad-cow disease variety, and also with the curious fact that human collagen generated by yeast has strands of uniform length, unlike regular gelatin, "made from bits of many, many animals blended together." (This is probably more interesting to me than to anyone else, as I am not only obsessed with all things translucent and gelatinous, and all things slightly macabre, but actually have a passing academic interest in the physics of gel formation.)

Only a verbal connection to the rest of this post, but I enjoyed Stephen Burt's post about Bob Mould, formerly of Hüsker Dü, and esp. Mould's comment about the parallels between "bear culture" and punk rock culture.