Indonesian bachelor Sumanto really digs older women. Digs them up, that is. Yes, I'm talking about corpses, not cougars.

news.ninemsn / CC

According to news reports, Sumanto dug up a grave and feasted on the flesh of an old woman's corpse for a "cheap and tasty meal." Fresh out of prison after serving time for this crime, he's promised that his people-eating days are over, vowing that he now just wants to "taste love" (I wonder if that's what he'll put on his Match.com profile). While his neighbors are giving him the cold shoulder, the kind folks at PETA Asia-Pacific are willing to offer him a hand in kicking corpse cuisine for good.

Instead of turning over a new grave, they're suggesting that Sumanto turn over a new leaf and go vegetarian. Like humans, animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone. They have the same capacity to love, and they experience fear in the face of death. When animals die, their families grieve too. To help with this transition, PETA Asia-Pacific is sending Sumanto a copy of The Compassionate Cook, PETA's first vegetarian cookbook, which is chock-full of "cheap and tasty" meals that won't cost him or anyone else an arm and a leg.

I highly recommend the Mock Chopped Liver, a dish that tastes so much like the real thing that it could fool even the most die-hard cannibals.

Posted by Amy Elizabeth

Yesterday, we mentioned an advertisement that we wanted to run in a Canadian newspaper in the wake of a shocking stabbing murder and possible cannibalism in Manitoba. Countless people have contacted us with their concerns, so we'd like to explain why we wanted to run the ad that no newspaper will touch with a 10' pole.

Yes, of course we were horrified (who wouldn't be?) when we heard the details of this barbaric, incomprehensible killing. And obviously, everyone's good thoughts go out to anyone affected by this violent act. That's all a no-brainer. Now, remember, PETA is known for being provocative—that's our job. The animals don't benefit from our silence. So our thought is always: How can we get people to see that despite their feelings about this kind of violence, they are often paying someone to do exactly what was done to the man on the bus, and worse, just so that they can eat a sandwich? Voila, the ad!

We see parallels between acts of violence against humans and cruelty to animals, since both spring from a common root. We understand that such comparisons may be uncomfortable for many people, but they're not inaccurate.

Responding to violence with anger is also natural, but just being angry solves nothing, does it? Real change comes about when we channel anger or sadness into action. By juxtaposing the shocking details of the murder with the fate of animals whose bodies are casually hacked apart to end up between two slices of bread, some good will come. Already, thousands of people have visited our site not just to scream at us but also to read about slaughterhouses, and many have watched "Meat Your Meat." If you can sit through that and not see the truth in what we are saying, what can we say?

Like humans, animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone. Animals in slaughterhouses experience terror in the face of death. They fight for their lives and struggle to avoid pain. Birds love and grieve. In light of animals' suffering, we are urging people to embrace nonviolence in the face of senseless violence—against all beings—by going vegetarian. If someone doesn't like it, maybe it is because it makes them feel guilty for just saying, "Oh, how terrible," about the bus violence but not wanting to face the fact that they contribute to violence as well. To think otherwise is simply supremacist.

As though it were a gruesome scene in a horror movie, a Canadian Greyhound passenger found himself in the hands of a highly disturbed man this past weekend while en route from Edmonton to Winnipeg. Passengers riding the bus reported that Vince Weiguang Li jumped on top of 22-year-old Tim McLean and began stabbing him repeatedly before cutting off his head and allegedly consuming some of his flesh. Parts of McLean's ear, nose, and mouth were found in Li's pocket.

This tragic incident will certainly leave scars on the minds of the other passengers and the victim's family and friends. While it isn't every day that a human is violently attacked and eaten by another human, it's worth noting that it is the norm for many people not to give any thought to the fact that restaurants are serving flesh that comes from innocents who were minding their own business before someone came after them with a knife. How amazingly and conveniently compartmentalized the human mind is…

To stress this very point, PETA will be running an ad in the Portage Daily Graphic comparing the similarities between this gruesome bus butchering and the acts of cruelty and killing performed every day by the meat industry.

The horror that cows, chickens, and pigs face on factory farms goes on for a long time too. Chickens are violently tossed into cages with dozens of other birds and forced to live amid their own waste. Baby pigs have their testicles ripped out without any painkillers. And male calves are starved and chained inside tiny stalls until their flesh becomes soft and milky white before being slaughtered for someone's veal dinner.

PETA is running the ad to make people rethink the proposition that it is, rightly so, a criminal act to kill and eat our own kind but that it's "OK" to kill every other species but our own and eat them.

I’ve written a fair amount about Sheriff J.B. Smith over the past couple of weeks, related to a back and forth he’s been having with us over a letter we wrote to him asking that he put an accused cannibal in his charge on a vegetarian diet. Well, the sheriff (who’s obviously doing a bang-up job over in Smith County, Texas) was in the news again this morning following a major drug bust in which he reportedly uncovered 242 pounds of marijuana hidden in a bin of lettuce inside a truck during a traffic stop. Anyway, the news report about the bust made me laugh out loud—the sheriff obviously has PETA on the brain:

“This was a great stop and it took a lot of drugs off the streets. … We are still working on this and are being assisted by the DEA, so there are still things we do not know.” Smith said his office is trying to contact the company that purchased the lettuce, but if the purchaser did not make immediate arrangements, it would be divided between the East Texas Food Bank and the Salvation Army. “We would also keep some of the lettuce and feed it to the (jail) population. This should make PETA happy, because we might be serving more salads in the next few days.”

Keep up the great work, sheriff, and thanks for keeping us in mind.

A little while back, we wrote to the county jail holding alleged cannibal Christopher Lee McCuin, asking that they put him on a flesh-free diet ASAP—since, apart from anything else, there really is something horribly perverse about feeding the guy body parts given the circumstances surrounding his arrest. We received a prompt response to our letter from one Sheriff J.B. Smith, who pointed out (very reasonably) that intentionally altering McCuin’s meals without changing all the other inmate’s meals might be viewed as prejudicial treatment, and asked if we could provide some documentation to support our statement that vegetarian meals promote nonviolence in correction facilities.

Our follow-up letter, which was faxed to the sheriff’s office today, does exactly that. Complete with references to Pythagoras, Albert Einstein, and Tolstoy, along with some information about trial programs at correctional facilities that have given all the inmates vegetarian food, it makes for a pretty good read. Here it is in full.

It’s just a suggestion of course, but I think it makes sense that a dude who’s been accused of cooking and eating someone should be put on a flesh-free diet. Or as PETA VP Bruce Friedrich puts it, “If people are revolted by the idea of eating a human corpse, they should also lose their appetites at the thought of eating the flesh of other tortured victims.” You can read Bruce’s letter to the Texas prison where accused murderer Christopher Lee McCuin is being held here.