Humans and Dragons *contains spoilers for Liveship and Tawny Man books*

[Chrischa]

An example of this latter point would be Halal slaughter which takes place in many Australian abattoirs (and I imagine many other abattoirs throughout the world). During Halal slaughter (though I am by no means an expert!), the person conducting the stunning of the live animal is a trained slaughterman and the person undertaking the ritual slaughter is a Muslim slaughterman. The Muslim slaughterman chants a prayer as he severs the beast's windpipe and carotid artery and also each time there has been a break in the slaughtering process.

I hadn't even thought about the Islamic Halal slaughter yet, but you're right. And according to Mason's book, this sort of thing has happened throughout human history, that only those sanctified, cleared of blame, or acting for the will of some other, authoritive being would be allowed to kill animals. It even happens in our own society because you and me will never have to slaughter a cow. We buy our meat in nicely presented, anonymous packages in the butcher's display window. And we pile the guild and responsability for the killing onto the shoulders of the people working behind the walls of the concealed slaughterhouses, people whom we generally perceive as cruel and almost mad to be doing the job they're doing. Thus we shift blame.
I'm talking very generally here, of course, I'm in no means looking down on the people doing those jobs.

I was watching a TV show about the dissection of a crocodile tonight and the 'armour' on the back and tail are incredibly dragon like to me! I think the largest documented crocodile is over 6 metres long - that's pretty damn huge - and it is rumoured they used to be a lot bigger than that. I think something like a 10 metre long crocodile is definitely getting into dragon size territory!!!!
I cannot explain where the real world inspiration for the wings of a dragon could possibly come from though!

Given the fact that our fantasy does nothing more then piece together things from our experiece, this seems very understandable to me. That is why, for example, we can't think of a non-existing colour. So to create these mythical creatures, people would have taken the armour of a crocodile, the wings of a bat, the skull of a horse, the tail of a lizard, ect. and put them all together. In short, they'd take everything which seems dangerous and indestructible in animals and put them in a dragon.

If you're interested in learning about the similarities of myths between cultures (he argues that all myths have more similarities than differences,) you can look up Joseph Campbell's book Myths to Live By, or you can watch the very good documentary series "The Power of Myth" with Campbell and Bill Moyers. He does mention the dissonance humans experience when it comes towards killing animals.

I read Cambell's book 'Hero of a Thousand Faces' and that was very intersting, I'd recommend that too. I'd love to read some more books like this which provide insight into human behaviour throught investigating our history, but I don't know where to start.