Thai Cannibals (gruesome)

[Jenn]

Photos purported to be Thai people eating a black man.

Comment: I doubt those photos are real. This must be a show or something. You can see those people are smiling when they are cutting human parts. I won't believe a regular person would do this without a fear. Please comment. Those aren't Chinese. Their clothes have one Chinese word also with some other languages (I believe they are Indonesian). Therefore, I suspect they are Indonesian. It is disgusting.

[Jenn]

[Jenn]

[snopes]

Medical/forensics class?

[Ariadne]

I don't know what's going on here, but I see nothing that suggests cannibalism. Many years ago I took an anthropology class that covered death rituals, and I believe some involved dismembering the dead. However, this seems like something a little more clinical, so the medical/forensics possibility makes sense to me.

ETA: I first read this as "Thai Cannabis" and wondered what could be so gruesome about that.

[KaiTheInvader]

I don't see anything here to suggest it's the man they're eating. also, the guy doesn't look and more "black" to me than the other people in the photos (except maybe a darker hue just from the death processes.)

[Kitsune27]

I'm going to have to agree with Snopes that this is probably a medical/forensics class, as it seems to follow what I've read described.

[Not_Done_Living]

A google search on SAWANG (which is one of the only clear words i could see in the pictures) came up with this site..

http://www.rescuesouthpattaya.com/

On review of the photos, i noticed that a large number of people have the same crest that is displayed on the web page sewn onto their garments.

In their photo gallery there is further corroboration that the photos posted are in fact of the Rescue South Pattaya EMS team (they are all wearing the same clothes/uniforms in the OP and the Gallery photos).

ETA: They ARE Thai btw.. but i stil lthink this would fall under "real photo, inaccurate description"

[Beejtronic]

Originally Posted by Not_Done_Living

A google search on SAWANG (which is one of the only clear words i could see in the pictures) came up with this site..

http://www.rescuesouthpattaya.com/

On review of the photos, i noticed that a large number of people have the same crest that is displayed on the web page sewn onto their garments.

In their photo gallery there is further corroboration that the photos posted are in fact of the Rescue South Pattaya EMS team (they are all wearing the same clothes/uniforms in the OP and the Gallery photos).

ETA: They ARE Thai btw.. but i stil lthink this would fall under "real photo, inaccurate description"

In addition, the crest on the tallest man's uniform is definitely an EMS crest, which is similar in many places: http://images.google.ca/images?hl=en...-8&sa=N&tab=wi

I imagine the "pot" was for boiling bits of skin off bone, which I understand is the standard method. You can see that they've removed the skin from the skull, presumably to better study it.

[Singing in the Drizzle]

Will have to have my wife take a look and see what she says. It will have to wait until she get up in the morning. Having spent the first 30 years of her life living in Thailand, she should have some interesting comments.

[kitap]

Originally Posted by Singing in the Drizzle

Will have to have my wife take a look and see what she says. It will have to wait until she get up in the morning. Having spent the first 30 years of her life living in Thailand, she should have some interesting comments.

Let's just hope her comment isn't her shrieking "oh dear lord, that's Uncle Fred!"

[Singing in the Drizzle]

Originally Posted by Not_Done_Living

AIn their photo gallery there is further corroboration that the photos posted are in fact of the Rescue South Pattaya EMS team (they are all wearing the same clothes/uniforms in the OP and the Gallery photos).

My wife took a quick look this morning, and said the people with writing on shirts are medics. She does not know why they are cutting up the body since she did not learn about the different death rituals of Thailand. Pattaya is about 400 miles Southwest of her home in Nakhon Phanom and she does not know their local customs.

Sometimes the most boring answer is the right one...

The uniforms those guys are wearing are for the Por-Tek-Tung, a volunteer emergency services/meat wagon in Thailand. I spent some time working in an ER in Thailand after the tsunami and met quite a few of those guys. They aren't cannibals, far from it they are all volunteering to receive karmic merit. If you're in a car accident (and live) they take you to the closest hospital. If you didn't make it, they'll take you to the closest monastery. They were founded by Chinese immigrants and still get funding from there, hence some of the writing on their shirts is in Chinese.

Por-Tek-Tung are often minimally trained, with little-to-no budget. What you're seeing in the picture is a body being reduced to a skeleton for training purposes. If they had the money to do it in a classroom or hospital,they would. Note the hospital wrist band and craniotomy sutures on the right side of his head- they didn't pull this guy off the street.

As for the eating, looks like a job that would take a while so I think you're just seeing a lunch break. And the pot-o-boiling bones, while I'm not sure, looks an awful lot like a 55 gallon drum with the top knocked in to make it a wok. Pretty much standard issue cooking equipment for that corner of the world- a guy used to fry eggs for me in one every morning.

[One-Fang]

Why do they need to know the intimate details of every body structure down to peeling the skin off a skull, to determine "is this guy dead or not" for a transportation destination decision?

I can buy the training situation but it doesn't sound like this particular service really requires much in the way of anatomy training.

[BoKu]

Originally Posted by tonygams

...What you're seeing in the picture is a body being reduced to a skeleton for training purposes...

Welcome to the board , Tonygams!

Originally Posted by One-Fang

...I can buy the training situation but it doesn't sound like this particular service really requires much in the way of anatomy training.

Maybe they're preparing a skeleton that an institution will use for training purposes. That seems a valid way to parse that statement.

[crescent]

Originally Posted by One-Fang

Why do they need to know the intimate details of every body structure down to peeling the skin off a skull, to determine "is this guy dead or not" for a transportation destination decision?

I can buy the training situation but it doesn't sound like this particular service really requires much in the way of anatomy training.

Well, Thailand is developing. Maybe they are looking at expanding from just taking people to the hospital, to actually doing EMT/Paramedic type stuff along the way - gotta start somewhere.

Taking apart a body could be educational, and keeping the bones for reference educational as well.

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by crescent

Taking apart a body could be educational, and keeping the bones for reference educational as well.

Taking a body apart helps you know "what bits to hold in where" if you're one of those guys transporting a victim to the nearest hospital (since accident victims can have bits hanging out of them). Don't forget that much of our modern knowledge comes from anatomists taking bodies apart to work out how they fitted together and modern anatomy classes can't be done entirely from textbooks. Also, it helps overcome some of the repulsion when taking a mangled body to a monastery, especially if you're in a culture where bodies are generally considered unclean and few will touch them.

[Beejtronic]

My sister is a paramedic and I'm pretty sure I remember her telling me that her training required taking part in a cadaver lab. Paramedics are trained in anatomy (obviously) and dissection is the best way to properly understand it.

I would think that even in Thailand, the paramedics likely do more than just cart the patient off the hospital.

[Wild Redhead]

Originally Posted by Ariadne

ETA: I first read this as "Thai Cannabis" and wondered what could be so gruesome about that.

I read it as "Cannabis" too! I had to read the thread because the title just didn't make sense.

Originally Posted by kitap

Let's just hope her comment isn't her shrieking "oh dear lord, that's Uncle Fred!"

YOMANK! Diet coke in the nose burns.

[GenYus234]

Originally Posted by tonygams

a volunteer emergency services/meat wagon in Thailand.

*snerk*

I know that is a common term for the morgue delivery wagon, but given the thread title...