Dead Pigs Used To Investigate Ocean's "Dead Zones"

timothy writes "As places to study what happens to corpses, the Atlantic Ocean is both much larger and much more specialized than the famous 'body farm' in Knoxville, TN. But for all kinds of good reasons, sending human bodies into Davy Jones' locker just to see where they float and how they bloat is unpopular. Pigs don't pay taxes, and more importantly, they don't vote. So Canadian scientists have taken to using them as human-body proxies, to study what happens when creatures of similar size and hairlessness (aka, us) end up 86ed and in the drink."

Comments

Waste not, want not.

[grub]

What a waste.

I was going to suggest a slashdot poll for this but there are only two realistic choices. Which makes more sense?

A) The current "Sink them to the depths of the ocean where they are eaten by sea critters for science"

B) Put them in my secret basement room where I could don a pig-head skin mask and have dry anal sex with their corpses while listening to opera.

.

Re:Waste not, want not.

[eln]

Note to self: Stay out of grub's basement.

Re:Waste not, want not.

[greyline]

You should listen to "Goodbye Horses" instead of opera.

Re:Waste not, want not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfff, Opera sucks, Firefox is much better.

Change from the original plan

[Chris Mattern]

They were going to use dead puppies, until they found out they're not much fun.

Re:Change from the original plan

[zepo1a]

I heard they were going to use dead cats, but the "101 Uses for a Dead Cat" publishing lobby vetoed that idea as changing the title of the book series to 102 would be too costly.

Much more efficient.

[Chris Burke]

This sounds like a much better idea than when they studied the Dead Zone in the 80s using Christopher Walken. Dead bloated pig corpses are more plentiful, not to mention way less creepy.

Bacon

[josteos]

Tastes awesome AND is great for fishing, crabbing, shrimping, sea starring, sharking, ...

Screw that

[elrous0]

Do you have any idea how many Bacon Double Cheeseburgers you can get out of a single pig and cow? You would throw all that deliciousness away just to get a 40-page article in Forensic Science Quarterly that comes to the final conclusion "They sink"?

Re:Screw that

[multiplexo]

Do you have any idea how many Bacon Double Cheeseburgers you can get out of a single pig and cow? You would throw all that deliciousness away just to get a 40-page article in Forensic Science Quarterly that comes to the final conclusion "They sink"?

No kidding. Why not, instead of using tasty pigs, round up a bunch of Tea Party members, anyone who thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to be president and everyone at Fox News, shoot them in the head and use their corpses for the testing. We'd not only end up with more tasty bacon but we'd also be improving the collective IQ of humanity by doing so, and accomplishing valuable science. It's all upside.

Re:Screw that

[elrous0]

Now, now, settle down. Besides, I'm pretty sure that shooting any of those particular people in the head wouldn't really hurt them.

I know one person eager to hear the results.

[SOdhner]

He's a blood spatter expert for Miami PD. He seems really, really interested in what they find. I wonder why?

Zombie pigs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Grains....GRAINS!

What a waste of good pork!

[Locke2005]

Why not simply use lawyers?

Dead pigs are useful to study scavengers because .

[tomhudson]

"This big hunk of meat on the seafloor represented a good food source for these marine creatures," she says.

"Scavengers are very important in the world. They're what allow things to restore."

The pigs are used by forensics researchers because - strange as it might seem - we humans are remarkably pig-like in our anatomy. We share their relatively hairless skin, are similar in size, and our flesh has a similar make-up and TASTE.

There, fixed it.

Human flesh isn't called "long pig" or "the other other white meat" for nothing.