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Comment by manuel_w | Hacker News Reader

> He was hospitalised due to exhaustion and became the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing.

Why the live cats? I mean, where's the point of eating them alive and not slaughtering them first?

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The article had earlier mentions of live animals, I find it odd that it didn't bother you until it got to 'cats'.

Eating live sea food (oysters, gold fish, octopus, etc.) isn't that uncommon in most cultures.

I thought a lot of the instances of supposed "live" small octupus being eaten that you can see in videos are actually recently-killed octopus that spasm when large amounts of soy sauce are applied to the tentacles, because of the salinity of the soy sauce.

Yes thats the truth for most of the American vloggers.

But there is plenty of shit like toads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_NW2A9D-tw

But really, is there really a difference between having something killed by you, or killed 5 seconds ago and eating raw

Probably as odd as people having dogs as pets but eating pigs?

People getting upset about animals being eaten alive/dead/at all is highly dependent on cultural background. There is no logic to it.

Look, I'm not suggesting anyone eat any kind of live animal, especially cats, but I think there's a question here of how exactly one would eat some of these animals... even my smallest cat is easily way too big to fit in my mouth and certainly too big to pass through my esophagus, and all of that disregards the very practical consideration of the animal fighting back. Thus, I read a great deal of dramatic flair and exaggeration in the article - it seems vey unlikely that he ate all of the things listed, at least not in the way they were described, but rather it seems likely that there arose some fables given the person's clear extreme appetite and habits.

At first glance, it is less surprising when he's eating live animals as a "warm-up act for a traveling charlatan" than when he does so as an experiment for medical professionals. With a little reflection this is probably more of a modern surprise -- medical ethics were a bit lax at the time I guess.

I suspect one of the reasons could have been for money. He would certainly have been a sideshow from an early age, wherever he went, and I'm sure people would find animals to give him on the condition he ate them live as entertainment.

They would have to be small or skinny cats though, even with an enlarged gullet.

I guess he was in a constant state of starvation, so no time to actually slaughter and turn the animal into meat.

What magical spell must be cast to turn animal into meat? Isn't it already meat just wearing a fur coat?

It's a magical spell cast with a very sharp knife, and involves a grisly process of removing all material typically considered inedible.

I think you'd at the very least separate the fur coat from the meat. Tarrare seemingly ate every part of the cat except for the bones - and then just vomited out the extra bits (like the fur coat).

> Why the live cats?

Abundance of kittens in every street corner, it's not like people castrated their cats in 18th century France.

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