Discussion of George Devereux's Article, The Cannibalistic Impulses of Parents

Received as The Forum went to press

I am afraid Dr. Devereux misquoted me: that bitch did not devour her foster child but finally reared it successfully. (The female that did devour her baby was a leopard.) I do not believe that the specifically human tendencies to cannibalism, for which there seems to be ample psychoanalytical evidence, have anything to do with the occasional eating of young mammals by their parents.

An omnivorous animal will eat practically any creature that is palatable and small enough to be killed. It is not the eating of the baby but the inhibition to do so which needs an explanation. Indeed this inhibition is very easily destroyed by abnormal circumstances or by damage to the parent animal's health. So I think that it is rather misleading to apply the

term of cannibalism to the eating of conspecifics in animals at all.

On the whole, “cannibalism” is quite rare among higher vertebrates. Fish, which do not perform any sort of parental care and which always produce large numbers of progeny, are about the only vertebrates I know that will eat babies of their own kind uninhibitedly. As practically all fish will eat small fishes, it does not matter if their own species is among those trying to devour the young, therefore no selection pressure is brought to bear on the development of mechanisms inhibiting “cannibalism.”