Why Maneaters remain so

I feel it's prudent to warn readers of the grisly nature of this post. I am a vegetarian by choice, but my mind is omnivorous ;-)

The New Year had a weird start with the "Panther" of Noida. CP Surendran writes in today's Sunday ToI:

A few years ago, a New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, for purely research reasons, procured from a hospital hand in Sorbonne human meat from an accident victim. What did the dish taste like? "It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was not like any other meat I had ever tasted….It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeable edible.”

He's putting it mildly. In his immensely delicious Maneaters, Peter Hathaway Capstick points to two cases that seem to indicate that humans finish at the top of the pecking order. In the chapter on Lions, one reads: (page 58, middle)

A trademark of these particular man-eaters was their love of human brains, every victim's skull carefully bitten open and licked clean of its contents. As is also very often classic with confirmed man-eaters, they would eat nothing but humans, disdaining cattle, goats, even chickens in their fondness for dark meat. Even the village herds of cattle seemed to lose their fear of lion scent as if knowing that it would be the herd boys who would be killed and eaten.

In the last chapter, on Cannibals, one reads: (pp. 238—239)

(George) Rushby asked the man (a cannibal) out of curiosity whether he preferred game or people as a staple diet. Describing the fact that human flesh is nicely marbled, rather the same property found in prime beef, variegated with streaks of fat through the lean, the cannibal advised George that human flesh behaves much more actively in the stew pot than does game flesh. Being much "lighter" than animal meat, it bounces and bumps around as if it were alive. Charming! Oh, yes, decided the cannibal sagely, human flesh was by far the best.