How to Tell when your Neighbours Are Cannibals Who Want to Eat your Children

Increasingly these days, people are cannibals who want to eat your children. Tough times in the economy and disillusionment with mass farming practices (thanks, Michael Pollan! thanks a bunch) have lead ever-larger numbers of people to choose cannibalism over just going to the grocery store. After all, why go shopping when your food source lives right next door, visible from the small holes you've bored in the fence to better observe your prey?

Today's cannibals invariably target children – not because they are presumed to have more flavourful or tender flesh, but because the habit of cannibalism disposes them to see people purely in terms of muscle and bone mass (the bones make a nice stock). Therefore the typical cannibal believes that children, being smaller, will not be missed as quickly.

It only takes a few cannibal families to deplete a neighbourhood of its children and drive down property values. Here are a few ways to tell if your new neighbours have a taste for long piglet.

They run an affordable daycare. Daycares are like candy stores for cannibals. Except children are made of meat, not candy. So daycares are like bacon stores for cannibals. Sure, some daycares are not run or staffed by cannibals, but even the few non-cannibal places out there still charge way too much. Beware of affordable daycare. Telltale signs include:, empty bottles of barbecue sauce in the parking lot, missing extremities on your child, 'self-grilling' games and activities, swimming pools full of marinade.

They have frequent outdoor barbecues. Cannibals hide their habits in plain sight. See a barbecue chained to the deck? Find that you're never invited over for one of their weekly backyard get-togethers? Think about it.

Coded language and slips of the tongue. If your neighbour refers to your kids as “fall-off-the-bone cute,” there may be a problem. And that problem involves your child getting eaten.

Plenty of other signs are discernible to the vigilant parent. Do your neighbours stay in all the time? Or go out too much? Are delicious smells wafting from their kitchen windows? Or even more suspiciously, no smells at all? Do they react with defensiveness or hostility when you call them out on their cannbalism? Do they refuse a reasonable request for regular searches of their home? How about when you put up signs warning everyone that the Bilsons next door are suspected child-eaters? Observe their body language carefully when they discover the signs and the burning effigies on their front lawn. Each little detail adds up.

You know what? Your neighbours are cannibals, and the only thing a cannibal respects is cannibalism. Eat one of their children, just to show you mean business. They may be angry at first, but they'll have a newfound respect for you. And you'll pleasantly surprised at the size of your next grocery bill.