Lever fra isbjørn kan drepe deg

Hvis du spiser isbjørn-lever, vil det også drepe isbjørnen, må vite.

Du kan også dø av å spise hund

Det er ikke bare lever fra isbjørn du kan dø av å spise, det samme gjelder for hundelever. Dette er en etablert sannhet i kulturer der man spiser hund, men kanskje ikke for så mange andre.

Under en mindre kjent polarekspedisjon (Mawson og Mertz) hvor mannskapet gikk tom for mat, ble de tvunget til å spise sledehundene. De døde etter å ha spist hundene sine, kanskje på grunn av overskuddet av vitamin A fra hundelever. Det skal angivelig ha vært en forferdelig måte å dø på:

• They had left no food depots on their way out; their choices were to head for the sea—a route that was longer but offered the chance of seals to eat and the slim possibility that they might sight the expedition’s supply ship—or to go back the way they’d come. Mawson selected the latter course.
• He and Mertz killed the weakest of their remaining dogs, ate what they could of its stringy flesh and liver, and fed what was left to the other huskies. ... The next morning Mawson awoke to find his companion delirious; worse, he had developed diarrhea and fouled himself inside his sleeping bag. ...
• Mawson wrote, but “at 8pm he raves & breaks a tent pole…. Continues to rave for hours. I hold him down, then he becomes more peaceful & I put him quietly in the bag. He dies peacefully at about 2am in the morning of 8th. Death due to exposure finally bringing on a fever. ... At 9 a.m. on January 11 the wind finally died away. Mawson had passed the days since Mertz’s death productively.
• Using his now blunt knife, he had cut the one remaining sledge in two; he resewed his sail; and, remarkably, he found the strength to drag Mertz’s body out of the tent and entomb it beneath a cairn of ice blocks he hacked out of the ground. Then he began to trudge toward the endless horizon, hauling his half-sledge. ...
• Within a few miles, Mawson’s feet became so painful that each step was an agony; when he sat on his sledge and removed his boots and socks to investigate, he found that the skin on his soles had come away, leaving nothing but a mass of weeping blisters. Desperate, he smeared his feet with lanolin and bandaged the loose skin back to them before staggering on. That night, curled up in his makeshift tent, he wrote:
• My whole body is apparently rotting from want of proper nourishment—frost-bitten fingertips, festerings, mucous membrane of nose gone, saliva glands of mouth refusing duty, skin coming off the whole body.