Would it be cannibalism to eat a polymorphed chicken?

[jinx crossbow]

Its cannibalism if you are also a chicken!
In all other cases no.

Jinx

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Under Baleful Polymorph, it retains it's alignment, continues to understand language, and if it could work out some "chicken scratch", it could even write!

A chicken that smart you don't eat all at once.

 

[talien]

This reminds me of a story my dad told me about. The gist of it was that a company made an awesome meat substitute. Everyone loved the flavor it was cheap to produce etc. But they were worried about it because it was synthetic HUMAN. Would more people become cannibals due to the fact that people know humans are tasty? Interesting idea.

More on topic yeah I would probably consider it cannibalism to eat a poly'd human.

Not just a story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ManBeef

People...it's what's for dinner.

 

[rgard]

Keeping this on a fowl theme, if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we conclude it's a duck.

No cannibalism!

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Felix]

Since you eat the body and not the soul (well I don't anyway) of the critter, I'd say you're eating chicken. No cannibalism.

The mind and spirits of the chickens I eat end up untouched in the rubbish bin, so why wouldn't a polymorphed chicken's?

----

What I'd like to know is that if you polymorphed an elf into a chicken and he lived out a chicken's short life-span and died of old-chicken age, would you be able to be resurrected him as an elf, or would he not qualify because of the "died of old age" clause?

 

[diaglo]

Don't they revert to their natural form when they die?

yes.

 

[DM-Rocco]

Rules lawyer explanation - If you polymorph a human into a chicken, once you kill him, he turns back into a human, so yes, eating him/her would be cannibalism. If you tried to eat him while alive, sicko, you might get that taste of raw chicken for a brief second (and maybe salmonella, fort save), but once the flesh is separated from the body, it turns into raw steak, yum.

Now whether or not the body is considered human if you kill it in chicken form depends on whether you view life as conception or not. Well, kind of, but that is something we can't really get into here

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Wouldn't it be more economical to polymorph chickens into humans? You could feed more people that way.

 

[Celebrim]

In all fantasy literature, a person's identity is not tied to the body they are currently inhabiting. Hense, cannibalism.

In D&D, the non-chickenness of the apparant chicken could be discerned by using a true seeing spell. Hense, even though it looks, tastes, and smells like chicken, it's not chicken.

 

[Stormborn]

More importantly, would a sheep polymorphed into a comly elf maid.... err never mind.

If a cleric took the bones of said polymorphed chicken and cast Ressurection on them what would result? A chicken or a person? If it came up in game I would rule that it was the person who was restored.

Basically I agree with Umbran, the creature in question retains sufficent qualities of a person to be thought of a more person than chicken and thus consuming it would be cannabalism.

This brings up a larger question about cannibalism in game. If an elf eats a dwarf is it cannibalism? Perhaps not technically by our definition, but then we dont have rules dealing with sentient nonhumans. In a campaing world I would think that knowning eating any sentient creature amounts to cannibalism and in the black and white world of DnD would be considered an "evil" act. Unknowningly doing so might also constitute an evil act for those bound by strict moral codes, such as a paladin or to a lesser degree druids and clerics.