Mortal competition

“Eat delicious chicken”, advertises the poster of the Beyza – “The taste you trust” – meat company in Urfa. I can’t help but agree with them, especially around lunch time like now. But why do the poultry, destined for the kebab skewers and the saç tava pan, do the cheerful Kurdish dance, happily waving the scarf, and why do the beef and sheep, presumably the former favorites of the audience, note with dismay that now they have less chance to end up in kuşbaşı and saç kavurma?

If I were a horse – to quote Evans-Pritchard’s famous fallacy –, I would not want to be eaten. I’d rather have someone else get eaten instead of me, if anyone at all. Evolutionary competition and natural selection are based on this consideration.

But I am human, just like the creator of the poster and its target audience. Therefore, I can at least grasp the anthropocentic view that the primary mission of certain animals is to serve us as food. That is why we removed them from the evolutionary competition and subjected them to artificial selection. The tastier it is, the more perfectly it has fulfilled its earthly mission. And it is clear that just as humans become frustrated and depressed when they fail to fulfill what they consider to be their earthly mission, so do animals collapse when a fellow from the farm outranks them in it.

And if I were a cow or a sheep, thinks the designer of the poster, this is probably how I would immortalize myself in this shamefully failed situation.

This line of thought is not entirely absurd. After all, we also know careers among people whose goal is senseless death, and their practicioners are at least as proud of this mission as the imagined cattle, sheep and chickens. For example, the gladiators, or the soldiers sent by dictators to be slaughtered at the front.

However, this line of thought and this poster are not new. Their original is Hungarian: the poster attributed to Frigyes Karinthy, the legendary gagman of the 1930s, on which the cow and the pig tearfully look at the success of the carp with consumers. Although Karinthy himself distanced himself from the authorship of the slogan, some other Hungarian may also have gone to Urfa to sell the punchline.

“Tell me, cattle, why this grief?” / “Cheaper the fish than the beef!”