As I work on my Druid’s guide to Mundane Animals, I always keep my eyes and ears out for strange, interesting, and possibly useful animals. So when I was listening to Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty I immediately perked up and did an inappropriate double take at my blank wall when she mentioned “Flesh Eating Turtles.”
What? This was a thing?
A couple google searches later and I had confirmed, that yes, there are such things as carrion turtles, and that these corpse eaters are regularly released into the Ganges River in an attempt at cleaning up the bodies slipped into the water by the bereaving poor who cannot afford the proscribed cremation before immersion into the sacred river.
And they have to do this regularly because the turtles are then poached out of the river to be sold to traditional asian medical markets.
… The cycle of life, people. They eat us, then we eat them to extinction.
Ok, I’m going to admit I just don’t see the health benefits of this side of traditional Chinese medicine, however, if you’re going to eat corpse eating turtle chips, couldn’t you know… you maybe farm the turtles? It could be a “two for one” farm, where you dispose of the dead and produce turtles for medicinal purposes?
…
yep. I don’t get it.
MCM Creative 