Thoughts on Zombie eating habits
Mar. 30th, 2013 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayWhat with one thing and another, I've been exposed to a bunch of zombie stories lately. Many of these, especially the classic Romero model and the more recent Walking Dead version, deliberately eschew any explanation of why there are zombies or how, in a technical sense, they function. I understand their artistic reasons for doing so, but there's a part of my brain that can't resist trying to find explanations anyways.
[I discount 'explanations' such as "magic" or "Satan", as being both out of character with the stories I'm thinking of, and also as merely moving the fundamental questions back one layer.]
The biggest question, to my mind, concerns basic laws of physics: where do zombies *get* the energy that powers their shambling? Some of these stories are set many months after the zombie apocalypse, yet we see no significant diminution in the ranks of the undead. Whatever keeps them moving seems to be pretty sustainable.
Most animals power themselves primarily by eating. The eating habits of zombies, however, do not seem sufficient for this, at a cursory overview. Zombies eat, apparently exclusively, the flesh of living human beings. But after the first hours of the outbreak, the zombies so far outnumber the living that this is clearly not sustainable as a primary energy source.
One aspect that seems odder the more I think about it is that zombies are *never* portrayed as eating other zombies. Even when a zombie has been 'killed' with a headshot, other nearby zombies show no interest in eating its flesh. Why not? It's probably got similar nutritional value to that of living humans. But they never seem even remotely interested.
Perhaps the flesh is not actually the point. What does a living human have, that a zombie doesn't (and thus, presumably wishes to consume in some fashion)? Two things come to mind: sentience... and *pain*.
Perhaps these zombies are actually being animated by extra-dimensional Lovecraftian entities along the lines of those portrayed in Charles Stross's "Laundry" stories. They don't want to eat your flesh, per se, they just want to *hurt* you. They are not, themselves, what we would recognize as sentient, but they are capable of 'driving' a brain that isn't occupied by a living mind. They don't 'know' enough to use guns or knives, but they can activate the host-brain's instinctual attack mechanisms, which feature biting as a significant component. The pain of a sentient mind is what they feed on.
Is this enough to explain the ongoing zombie hordes, and all their energy expenditure? Not entirely, but I think one more guess will bring us a lot closer. If the zombies are being animated from outside, then they aren't necessarily animated *all the time*. Which actually fits the portrayed stories surprisingly well. Often, a group of survivors will arrive in a new location, and it seems entirely zombie-free. Perhaps during early explorations one or two zombies may suddenly lurch out of dark corners and attack, but there don't seem to be any zombies actively shambling about. As the survivors stay in one place, however, active zombies *do* begin to appear; at first a few, but in ever-increasing numbers, until the survivors are overwhelmed or flee. Perhaps this is because the place was full of corpses all along -- but they weren't being animated. Perhaps there was a tiny energy investment in preventing decay, but that could plausibly be quite small. It's only after the introduction of potential 'food', that the zombies begin to be re-animated. Hence, we don't have to explain how millions of zombies can be active for months or years, we just have to explain how any given zombie (out of a potential pool of millions) can be active for a few days or weeks. Heck, maybe they're just burning stored cellular energy from when they were alive, and there *isn't* any new energy input into the system.
Aside from newly-turned zombies, of course. Which, in this model don't need to have any pre-mortem exposure to any sort of infecting vector. Indeed, the mythology of the zombie bite carrying zombie-ism may be a simple mistake. Being bitten by a *living* human is actually one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you, in terms of infection and disease. It seems likely that the bite of a zombie isn't going to be *safer*. So, if you get bit, there's a good chance that you'll die from it, but not directly from zombie-ism per se. Not that that's any consolation.
[As ever, my ideas are freely offered to the universe; feel free to use them if you like.]
[I discount 'explanations' such as "magic" or "Satan", as being both out of character with the stories I'm thinking of, and also as merely moving the fundamental questions back one layer.]
The biggest question, to my mind, concerns basic laws of physics: where do zombies *get* the energy that powers their shambling? Some of these stories are set many months after the zombie apocalypse, yet we see no significant diminution in the ranks of the undead. Whatever keeps them moving seems to be pretty sustainable.
Most animals power themselves primarily by eating. The eating habits of zombies, however, do not seem sufficient for this, at a cursory overview. Zombies eat, apparently exclusively, the flesh of living human beings. But after the first hours of the outbreak, the zombies so far outnumber the living that this is clearly not sustainable as a primary energy source.
One aspect that seems odder the more I think about it is that zombies are *never* portrayed as eating other zombies. Even when a zombie has been 'killed' with a headshot, other nearby zombies show no interest in eating its flesh. Why not? It's probably got similar nutritional value to that of living humans. But they never seem even remotely interested.
Perhaps the flesh is not actually the point. What does a living human have, that a zombie doesn't (and thus, presumably wishes to consume in some fashion)? Two things come to mind: sentience... and *pain*.
Perhaps these zombies are actually being animated by extra-dimensional Lovecraftian entities along the lines of those portrayed in Charles Stross's "Laundry" stories. They don't want to eat your flesh, per se, they just want to *hurt* you. They are not, themselves, what we would recognize as sentient, but they are capable of 'driving' a brain that isn't occupied by a living mind. They don't 'know' enough to use guns or knives, but they can activate the host-brain's instinctual attack mechanisms, which feature biting as a significant component. The pain of a sentient mind is what they feed on.
Is this enough to explain the ongoing zombie hordes, and all their energy expenditure? Not entirely, but I think one more guess will bring us a lot closer. If the zombies are being animated from outside, then they aren't necessarily animated *all the time*. Which actually fits the portrayed stories surprisingly well. Often, a group of survivors will arrive in a new location, and it seems entirely zombie-free. Perhaps during early explorations one or two zombies may suddenly lurch out of dark corners and attack, but there don't seem to be any zombies actively shambling about. As the survivors stay in one place, however, active zombies *do* begin to appear; at first a few, but in ever-increasing numbers, until the survivors are overwhelmed or flee. Perhaps this is because the place was full of corpses all along -- but they weren't being animated. Perhaps there was a tiny energy investment in preventing decay, but that could plausibly be quite small. It's only after the introduction of potential 'food', that the zombies begin to be re-animated. Hence, we don't have to explain how millions of zombies can be active for months or years, we just have to explain how any given zombie (out of a potential pool of millions) can be active for a few days or weeks. Heck, maybe they're just burning stored cellular energy from when they were alive, and there *isn't* any new energy input into the system.
Aside from newly-turned zombies, of course. Which, in this model don't need to have any pre-mortem exposure to any sort of infecting vector. Indeed, the mythology of the zombie bite carrying zombie-ism may be a simple mistake. Being bitten by a *living* human is actually one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you, in terms of infection and disease. It seems likely that the bite of a zombie isn't going to be *safer*. So, if you get bit, there's a good chance that you'll die from it, but not directly from zombie-ism per se. Not that that's any consolation.
[As ever, my ideas are freely offered to the universe; feel free to use them if you like.]
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Date: 2013-03-30 08:54 pm (UTC)