Animal rights Halloween hazards: Candy corn, chocolate milk, and squid ink pasta with baby octopus

Ghostly octopus: 10 incredibly strange cephalopods – click image

Kathleen Stachowski   Other Nations

Ever notice how those “scariest animal” lists that appear around Halloween (bats! spiders! snakes! sharks!) always omit the most truly frightening candidate–Homo sapiens? I mean, what could be scarier than realizing you’re of the same species as the callous, wolf-killing Idahoan who twirls his gun and revels in his self-congratulatory “John Wayne sh*t” while he films the animal suffering in death throes?!? Yikes.  

A Day of Reckoning

David Cassuto

Halloween is my birthday.  That fact alone likely would not merit the holiday’s mention here.  I note it because only this year – some forty-odd years into my marking of the day– did I stop to consider what makes this holiday unusual.  First, my son, Jesse, whose tastes seem to be rather typical for his age group, debated for weeks whether to dress up as Genghis Khan or as John Dillinger.  Other candidates on the slate include the Grim Reaper and an assassin.  This approach seems atypical of our cultural observances.

A second unique characteristic of Halloween lies with the fact that it does not revolve around the consumption of animals.  Easter and Christmas require hams, Thanksgiving involves turkeys, Passover needs a sheep shank and chicken soup, and July 4^th is about barbecue.  The list goes on.  American festivals are meal-based and animals pay a mortal price for our food-related revelry.  Except, that is, during Halloween.