Welcome to life back at the Valley! What What!?
So here begins the real adventure in my freshman Forensics class at the Valley...and I'm one-upping myself this time I think!
In the past, we've used rats (quite unethically I must add) to accomplish a Body Farm lab during our unit on Forensic Entomology. We placed the rat off campus and took detailed notes over about a 2 week period as Blow flies, flesh flies, carrion beetles, rove beetles and others infested the carcass. Notes is pretty much where we left it...and some interesting pictures.
I've read up some more though...gotten a little wiser and hopefully more ethically minded and now, we've got an intense Entomology unit underway.
I've spent the last 3 days calling around to animal shelters in the greater Columbia area in search of an euthanized stray dog or cat. If you're not familiar with the controversial stray animal policy in Columbia, it goes like this: Strays picked up by animal control are dropped off at a specific animal shelter based on the county. The shelter has 2 weeks to find homes for the strays. If no home is found, the strays are euthanized and dumped in the county landfill.
So...why waste a perfectly good dead dog or cat in a landfill when my forensics students can learn from it? A couple of the animal shelters wouldn't go along with it, but one finally provided me with a cat!
Here's the issue...Euthanasia is done by a lethal injection of Sodium phenobarbitol. It immmediately shuts down the cerebellum...stopping the heart and diaphragm....no pain, real quick death.
...but it stays in the body as potential poison to scavengers. Typically the landfill workers are supposed to put a new load of trash over the carcasses once they're deposited, but SC has gotten in a little trouble before for a couple of bald eagles dying a the landfills while feeding on these euthanized strays.
That raises an important question with our lab.
Are we going to be harming any scavengers? Technically, Sodium phenobarbitol is not harmful to insects...only birds and mammalian scavengers like foxes, coyotes, etc. To deter these critters from feeding on our lab, and hopefully keep it just between us and the insects, we placed the cat in a cage out in the woods behind campus.
So here's to 2 weeks of observation, insect collection, and life cycle analysis as it relates to the post mortem interval of our cat.
...a moment of silence for the dearly departed...
...now let's collect some bugs!
happy hunting,
jeff
