I have been enlightened. I know exactly what my role on this Earth is.
Yesterday, my wife found a dead rabbit in the shrubbery in our yard. You couldn’t miss it — the odor was horrific. So of course she sent me out to dispose of it.
It had been disemboweled and left to rot for several days. I found spoor nearby, and I suspect the killer was a dog, since cats tend to be more fastidious and don’t leave large lumps of poop nearby. I scraped it into a garbage bag, and noticed that the entire body cavity was a writhing mass of maggots.
I did not take pictures of that, even if I was impressed. You can thank me for that.
I put the body in our garbage can. Fortunately, garbage pick up was the next day, that is, this morning. I figured I was done.
My wife interrupted me again this morning. She’d gone to bring the trash can into the garage this morning, only it wasn’t empty. She told me it was “insect related,” so it was my job.
The trash can was covered in maggots. They were in masses on the bottom, had crawled up the sides, were covering the lid, and were dripping off the container into the grass.
I will share a photo of the lid.
The rabbit was gone, and we’re talking tens of thousands of homeless maggots crawling everywhere. Everything was covered with maggots, which I guess explains why Mary hadn’t brought the garbage can in.
I used a garden hose to clean it up. There is now a patch of our yard that has been enriched with a wiggly mass of protein, I hope the birds appreciate it.
A real life lord of the flies…..
A few years back I came across a fresh groundhog carcass along a line of brush. There were a few flies buzzing about. I saw no reason to disturb it, but out of curiosity I returned frequently to look. Before long it was a writhing mass of maggots. The innards disappeared first, then the flesh. In about a week all that remained were some dry skin and the bones laid out as if for an anatomy demonstration.
Mildly surprised you didn’t harvest all that free spider food!
I’m surprised you didn’t find the mutt proudly rolling around in the freaking stench.
Our lives share some similarities. If my wife found a dead rabbit in our garden writhing with maggots, I would get the task of disposing of it. Anything related to garbage is my job. She will dispose of a dead bird now and then. We usually bury them…compost you know. Burying a rabbit might be problematic because a coyote or fox might did it up.
You could have collected the maggots and sent them to the White House, perhaps with a note saying “These must belong to you maggots.” I realize neither Dumpster nor any of the main gang would ever see them, but someone there would have to deal with it.
Of course, they might trace it back to you and cause you trouble…never mind.
A few years ago, while I was biking on the Capital Trail, I spotted a dead beagle in the grass. It must’ve been hit by a car. It still had a collar around its neck. I figured the carcass would soon be gone. The buzzards here are fat from all the roadkill. But, no. As the days passed, the body simply collapsed and slowly disintegrated into the ground. Soon only some fur covered ribs were left. I still wonder why the carrion eaters like vultures avoided a big, fat dog carcass when they will pounce on a dead deer like a scene from the Serengeti. Vultures have an exceptional sense of smell that allows them to detect carrion from great distances. There was something about a domesticated dog’s smell that put them off. Something to ponder.
Why didn’t you just bury it and nourish your property? Landfilling is a waste.
What precautions did you take? Did you at least wear a mask and gloves? ‘Do not touch or move dead rabbits’: National Parks warn of bunny virus
Life finds a way.
Or at least tries to.
As Carl Linnaeus wrote, three flies will consume the carcass of a horse as quickly as as lion.
That was an odd article. AI results on this are very bad, IME. What I have typed below is a summary from scientific paper abstracts or government sources.
The virus in question only affects rabbits. It is not (yet, that has been reported) in Minnesota. Humans can be vectors from clothing and not themselves apparently. They say ‘wash your hands’, which I find is a mildly strange thing to say. That is, it is said to be durable out in the environment. High temperature does not kill it, so presumably you would need bleach or something, if you owned or were likely to encounter rabbits somehow.
In general, you shouldn’t touch a dead rabbit because there are other actual zoonoses. I trust PZ to have been smart about this.
It has wiped out about 60% of the invasive rabbits in Australia, report date about seven years ago.
Fans if detective stories with forensic science (Doyle et al) will be familiar with the use of insect pupae to estimate the season a body was deposited.
If you had a proper population of buzzards and/or vultures this would not be a problem. And I am told Komodo dragons like their food on the smelly side.
… it was “insect related,” so it was my job.
Surely anything biological is your job.
“Why didn’t you just bury it and nourish your property?”
Nothing “just” about digging a hole in summer heat.
“Landfilling is a waste.”
Fair enough. But as that component of landfill well quickly an organically decompose I don’t think it’s that big a deal. Well, … not enough that I’m going to voluntarily dig a hole in summer heat.
“As Carl Linnaeus wrote, three flies will consume the carcass of a horse as quickly as as lion.”
Well, that’s hardly surprising as a lion and a horse are of similar size.
The flies buzzed over that putrid stomach
from which there emerged black battalions
of larva, which poured like a thick liquid
down the sides of those living rags
The whole of it went down, went up like a wave
or spittled out while bubbling
one would have said that the corpse, inflated by a vague breath,
lived as it multiplied.
— And yet, you will resemble this refuse,
this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sun of my nature,
You, my angel and my passion!
(short quote from the full poem at https://fleursdumal.org/poem/126 )
@seachange #11:
Usually the idea of washing your hands is to use hot water and soap to remove the particles (fatty deposits either transferred or from your own sebaceous glands) from the lines and wrinkles of your skin on which microbes adhere, accumulate and breed. You wash your hands before you transfer too much of this to your face or other places with lots of mucus membranes.
(‘Scuse the poor grammar. It’s too hot and I’m half asleep.)
[What Rich wrote; soap is hydrophilic at one end and hydrophobic at the other so grease/fats can attach to it and precipitate, thus being able to be physically washed off — that’s soap scum. Detergents work a bit differently, but same thing; physical removal of guck]
[I have been corrected by the chatbot as to my recollection from High School, lo these decades ago; sez it]
Accurate core, but a few refinements:
Mechanism clarity: Soap doesn’t cause grease to precipitate—it emulsifies it. The hydrophobic tails embed in grease; hydrophilic heads face water, forming micelles. These suspend grease in water, allowing rinsing—not precipitation.
Soap scum distinction: Soap scum isn’t emulsified grease. It’s a precipitate formed when soap reacts with calcium or magnesium ions in hard water, producing insoluble salts (e.g., calcium stearate).
Terminology: “Attach to it and precipitate” conflates two processes—adsorption/emulsification and ionic precipitation. Better to separate them.
Suggested revision:
Clean, precise, and chemically accurate. Want a diagram or reaction equation? I can supply.
If only we could dispose of people with such ease.
It’s the smell.
And the ritual.
Same thing happened to me a couple summers ago, except it was a dead fox (killed by a car), and it was a full 3 days until garbage pickup. After realizing that the stench was pissing off my neighbour (after a mere night’s marination in my bin), I had to move the bag-o’-carrion to the garbage bin of an unoccupied house (the occupants were out of the country for a few months, so their bin won the lottery to become the smelliest bit of real estate in my neighbourhood for a few days). It was a profound stench…I thought I knew what death smelled like, until that incident. Now I wish I could go back to a time when I DIDN’T know.
Another thing of which I was ignorant was the fact that yellow jackets eat meat – last September, I saw not one, but two cat kills (rabbits) which were infested with the nuisance hymenopterans, going to town like rabid zombies. Nature is disgusting.
Collect a few cup of those things, chop some veggies, and make a stir fry. With enough butter and garlix you can eat anything.