2025.10.17 – How to Survive on Wild Meat Without Dying from It: From Rabbit Starvation to the Laughing Death of Kuru

Posted byLeonardo Tomás CardilloPosted inUncategorized

Key Takeaways

  • Eating only very lean meat—like rabbit—can be fatal, a phenomenon known as rabbit starvation.
  • Polar bear liver is one of the most toxic animal foods on Earth because of its enormous vitamin A concentration.
  • Exotic meats such as seal, hippo, crocodile, or snake vary in safety and nutrition; some can sustain you in survival, others can kill you.
  • Human flesh is neither ethical nor safe to eat—it carries deadly infectious risks, including prion diseases.
  • The Fore people’s tragic experience with kuru (“the laughing death”) in Papua New Guinea revealed how cultural rituals and biology can collide, transforming medicine forever.

Why This Matters

When survival strips life to its essentials, food becomes both salvation and threat.
From the Arctic to the tropics, human history is filled with lessons about what can and cannot sustain us.
This piece gathers those lessons—from the quiet dangers of rabbit meat to the haunting story of a disease spread by love and ritual.

When Lean Meat Becomes a Killer

Rabbit is easy to hunt and cook—roasted over a fire, simmered into stew, or dried for travel.
But as explorers discovered, eating only rabbit leads to slow starvation.
The body cannot survive on protein alone; without fat or carbohydrates, metabolism collapses.
Nausea, exhaustion, and dehydration follow, and death can arrive in weeks.

The term rabbit starvation comes from early Arctic explorers who lived on rabbit meat alone, but it applies to any diet composed almost entirely of very lean meat.
It is a cruel paradox where plenty of food still leads to hunger.

The Polar Bear’s Secret Poison

In the Arctic, danger hides in the richest organs.
Polar bears sit atop the marine food chain, and their livers store staggering amounts of vitamin A.
Just a few mouthfuls can trigger hypervitaminosis A—vomiting, peeling skin, dizziness, and even coma.
Explorers once learned this the hard way.
The simple rule remains: never eat polar bear liver, no matter how desperate the cold or hunger.

Other Wild Meats: Promise and Peril

  • Seal – Packed with fat and omega-3s, a lifeline in Arctic survival. But its liver, like the bear’s, can be toxic in large amounts.
  • Hippopotamus – Rich, fatty meat that can sustain life if thoroughly cooked to kill parasites.
  • Crocodile – Lean, white meat similar to fish. Safe when cooked, but too low in fat to rely on alone.
  • Snake – Useful for protein but dangerously lean. Must be well cooked.
  • Ostrich – Healthy, iron-rich red meat, yet still too lean for long-term survival diets.
  • Eagle – Off-limits. Protected by law and risky because raptors accumulate toxins.

In any survival scenario, fat is life.
A diet of pure protein will eventually kill, no matter how much you eat.

Fish and Cholesterol: The Better Balance

Rabbit meat is low in cholesterol, but fish offers something better: protection.
White fish—like cod or hake—is extremely low in fat and cholesterol.
Fatty fish—like salmon or mackerel—contains more fat and cholesterol, yet its omega-3 fatty acids support cardiovascular health when eaten in moderation.
In survival contexts, fatty fish are valuable but should be balanced with safe, varied sources when possible.
If you are forced to live off one food, make sure it is not the leanest one.

The Forbidden Meal: Human Flesh

History, hunger, and myth have all tested the human taboo of cannibalism.
Yet beyond ethics, the biology alone is horrifying.
Eating human tissue can transmit prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, along with hepatitis, HIV, and tuberculosis.
Even in survival extremes, it is almost never worth the risk.

Even so, history has shown that in the most desperate moments, survival can force the unthinkable.

The Andes: When Survival Crossed the Unthinkable

In October 1972, a Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying a rugby team crashed high in the Andes Mountains, on the Argentine side of the border with Chile.
For seventy-two days, the survivors endured blizzards, avalanches, and starvation.
When every supply was gone, they faced the most terrible decision: to live, they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died.

It was not ritual or madness—it was desperation in its purest form.
With no fire and temperatures below freezing, they cut thin slices from the frozen bodies using shards of glass and metal.
They prayed before eating, believing it was the only way to honor their fallen friends.

After seventy-two days trapped in the mountains, sixteen people were rescued.
The world was horrified at first, but eventually understood: it was not savagery, it was survival.
Unlike the kuru tragedy, no disease followed—these were healthy bodies, preserved by the cold, and the act ended when help arrived.
No infection spread, though the emotional scars lasted a lifetime.
Their story remains one of the most haunting lessons about the limits of hunger and the will to live.

(Documented in Alive by Piers Paul Read and in survivor accounts such as the 1993 film Alive and later documentaries.)

How Scientists Read Bones and Stories

Anthropologists have learned to separate rumor from fact.
They read the past through scars on bone: knife cuts, burn marks, crushed marrow.
They study ancient proteins and DNA to tell human from animal, ritual from hunger.
They compare myths and missionary journals to see where misunderstanding meets truth.
Sometimes, as in Papua New Guinea, the stories were tragically real.

Kuru: The Laughing Death

Among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, love for the dead once meant consuming them.
It was a final act of devotion—a way to keep the spirit close.
But it also brought a silent killer: kuru, meaning “to tremble.”

Victims lost balance, strength, and control over their own laughter.
They laughed and cried without reason, their brains eaten away by misfolded proteins called prions.
Women and children suffered most, as they were the ones who prepared and ate the brain.
The illness could hide for decades before showing itself, and once it began, death came within a year.

In the late 1950s, researchers D. Carleton Gajdusek and Vincent Zigas proved that kuru was transmissible through those funerary rites.
In the 1980s, Stanley Prusiner identified the infectious agent itself as a prion—a new biological principle of disease.
When the practice ended, the epidemic slowly vanished, but its lessons reshaped medicine.
Kuru revealed the terrible cost of love expressed through ritual—and the biological limits of what the human body can bear.

Understanding the Science Behind It

Prion (proteinaceous infectious particle)

A protein that folds the wrong way and forces others to copy its error.
It spreads like an infection, destroying brain tissue and causing transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.

Prionic (prion-related)

Anything related to these abnormal proteins or the diseases they cause.

Hypervitaminosis A

A state of vitamin A poisoning, often caused by eating livers of Arctic animals such as bears or seals.

Rabbit Starvation (translated from Spanish “inanición del conejo”)

A dangerous form of malnutrition from surviving only on extremely lean meat, without fat or carbohydrates.

Endocannibalism (mortuary)

A ritual act of consuming the flesh of one’s own dead relatives as a sign of respect or spiritual unity.

“Laughing Death” (translated from Spanish “risa mortal”)

A name given to kuru, referring to the uncontrollable laughter that appears as the disease destroys emotional control in the brain.

Sources

All links verified and active as of 17 October 2025 (22:00 Europe/Amsterdam).

Published by Leonardo Tomás Cardillo

https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonardocardillo

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