dog food documentary

last month i visited a body farm in texas.so these are places where researchers take recently deceased human bodies and they essentiallyjust leave them out to decompose. so this research, mainly it's helpful when law enforcementcome across a body under mysterious circumstances, maybe a murder, and they want to know howlong has it been out here. the bodies are scattered all over the field. they have about50 out and most of them are under these metal cages that prevent the vultures from gettingin. i kept asking him to lift up the cages for me to get better photos. so what happensright after you die is all the fluids that are inside your cells when you're alive leakout and bacteria start feeding immediately. there converting the liquids and solids insideyou into gasses that they emit, and this causes

the second stage, which is bloat. you alsohave something called marbling during this stage because one of the gases, sulfur, bindsto the hemoglobin molecules in your blood and changes the color of them to an orangeor yellow. and at the same time, flies come. they come almost immediately when the bodyis placed, and they lay eggs. and they especially lay them in any orifices, so your head willget a lot of maggots on it -- the eye sockets and mouth and nose, and they'll eat away atthat first. they're absolutely just crawling all over the body, like, getting up reallyclose to it and taking photos was the most intense thing i did there. then after a fewdays of that, the body moves to the third stage, which is called purge. and that's ultimatelythe bloating is relieved as a lot of the gas

and fluids leak out and you see this darkfluid pooling around the body. and the interesting thing is that fluid is really nutrient rich,but it's so rich in nitrogen that it kills off the plants initially. but a year later,it'll become especially fertile. so here this is the next stage. a lot of the changes happenreally rapidly at first, and then it slows down a lot. there's certainly still bacteriahere, but if you were to graph all the nutrients, it's a very sharp decline. if the body isin the sun, especially in texas, the heat is so strong that a lot of bacteria and insectscan't actually survive. and so instead of continuing to decompose the body, it willreally gradually mummify -- it'll just dry up. but if the body is in the shade, thenthe bacteria and insects can continue to feed

on it and they'll essentially eat it downto a skeleton. with the vultures, the process is completely different because a flock ofthem will just swarm a body immediately if it's left uncaged, and they can eat prettymuch all of the flesh off within a few hours. one of the things that really fascinated meis the way that the bones are frayed. and that's from their beaks ripping at it voraciously.and that looks like leather or clothing, but it's skin. typically they're left out to decomposefor 6 to 12 months. so when the bodies come in, they'll boil them and they put detergenton them and that strips away most of the remaining flesh. and then volunteer undergraduate internswill clean every single bone with a toothbrush. the smell was actually the strongest insidethat lab. it smells like rotting meat, which

is essentially what it is -- you know, justorganic substances that have gone bad. and then after they get clean they get laid backout, they get labeled, and then they get sent to the lab closer into town where they getboxed up. and so this basically serves as a contemporary skeleton collection, whichthere aren't that many of, as it turns out. we really seldom see bodies anymore in ourmodern culture. most people die in a hospital. they get directly sent to a funeral home.that funeral home injects them with formaldehyde and puts makeup all over them, so they don'tlook like a dead body. but the truth is that ultimately, whether we see it or not, thishappens. unless you get cremated, it's going to happen to you. i mean, that's what ecosystemsevolved to do -- is harvest nutrients

to create new life.