Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: And Other Questions About Dead Bodies

by Caitlin Doughty

If you have a heart attack in your living room and no one finds you before you miss your coffee date with Sheila next Thursday, a hungry and impatient Snickers McMuffin may abandon his empty food bowl and come check out what your corpse has to offer. Cats tend to consume human parts that are soft and exposed, like the face and neck, with special focus on the mouth and nose. Don’t rule out some chomps on the eyeballs—but Snickers is more likely to go for the softer, easier-access choices. Think: eyelids, lips, or tongue.

“Why would my beloved do that?” you ask. Let’s keep in mind that, as much you adore your domesticated meowkins, that sucker is an opportunistic killer that shares 95.6 percent of its DNA with lions. Cats (in the United States alone) slaughter up to 3.7 billion birds every year. If you count other cute little mammals like mice, rabbits, and voles, the death toll might rise to 20 billion. This is an abject massacre—a bloodbath of adorable forest creatures perpetrated by our feline overlords. Mr. Cuddlesworth is a sweetheart, you say? “He watches TV with me!” No, ma’am. Mr. Cuddlesworth is a predator. The good news (for your dead body) is that some pets with slithery, sinister reputations might not have the capacity (or interest) to eat their owners. Snakes and lizards, for example, won’t eat you postmortem—unless you happen to own a full-grown Komodo dragon.

But that’s the end of the good news. Your dog will totally eat you. “Oh no!” you say. “Not man’s best friend!” Oh yes. Fifi Fluff will attack your corpse without remorse. There are cases where forensics experts first suspect a violent murder has occurred, only to discover that the damage was Ms. Fluff attacking the dead body postmortem. Your dog might not nip and tear at you because she’s starving, however. More likely Fifi Fluff will be attempting to wake you up. Something has happened to her human. She’s probably anxious and tense. In this situation, a dog might nibble the lips off her owner, just like you bite your nails or refresh your social media feed. We all have our anxiety busters! One very sad case involved a woman in her forties who was known to be an alcoholic. Often, when she was intoxicated and unconscious, her red setter would li...

Tell you what’s not going to work: marching on over to your local funeral home and saying, “Greetings! That’s my mom’s corpse over there. Could you just pop off her head and de-flesh her skull? That would be great. Thanks!” Your average funeral home (really, any funeral home) is not set up to handle such a request, legally or practically. As a funeral director, I honestly have no idea what equipment a proper decapitation requires. The subsequent de-fleshing is far beyond me. I assume it involves boiling and/or dermestid beetles, but that’s not in the mortuary school curriculum.

Medical professionals have stolen corpses and even dug up fresh graves to get bodies for dissection and research. Then there are cases like that of Julia Pastrana, the nineteenth-century Mexican woman with a condition called hypertrichosis that caused hair to grow all over her face and body. After she died, her embalmed and taxidermied corpse was taken on world tour by her awful husband. He saw there was money to be made by displaying Julia in freak shows. Julia had ceased to be regarded as human; her corpse had become a possession.

In one seven-month period in 2012–13, there were 454 human skulls listed on eBay.com, with an average opening bid of $648.63 (eBay subsequently banned the practice). Many skulls for private sale have questionable origins, sourced from the thriving bone trades in India and China. The bones are obtained from people who couldn’t afford cremation or burial—not exactly ethical sourcing. These plucky bone sellers will tell you that it’s not human remains they sell, but human bones. Most state laws prohibit the sale of “remains,” but bones are totally legal and in keeping with the law, they will say.

The answer here is yes, dead bodies can move by themselves, but the movements are small, and caused by science! Not ghosts. Or demons. Or zombies. Just be glad you’re not an attendant at the Leichenhaus.

How deep was Growler buried? He’ll decompose more slowly if you dug way down, many meters under that maple tree. The deeper he is buried, the farther away he is from oxygen, microbes, and other things that speed up the decomposition process.

This leads to the first solid, visible sign of death, livor mortis. Livor mortis is the pooling of blood in lower areas of the corpse, usually a person’s back. (Again, thanks, gravity.) The pools tend to be purple in color. In Latin, the phrase means “the bluish color of death.”

If the livor mortis is bright cherry red, that might mean the person died in the cold, or by inhaling carbon monoxide (maybe smoke from a fire). If the livor mortis is deep purple or pink, that might mean the person suffocated, or died of heart failure. Finally, if a person has lost a lot of blood, you might not find any livor mortis at all.

Welcome to putrefaction. This is when the famous green color of death comes into its own. It’s more of a greenish-brown, actually. With some turquoise. You could call this color “putrid,” and you’d be totally correct. The green-purple-turquoise blossoms of putrefaction are caused by bacteria. Remember when I said that even after you die there are still fun things happening inside your flesh case? Well, bacteria are the most important guests at the party. Gut bacteria go wild, digesting you from the inside.

The green colors appear first in the lower abdomen. That’s the bacteria from the colon breaking free and starting to take over. They are liquefying the cells of the organs, which means fluids are sloshing free. The stomach swells as gas starts to accumulate from the bacteria’s “digestive action” (i.e., bacteria farts). As the bacteria multiply and spread, so does the green discoloration, eventually ripening to a darker green or black.

body will then swiftly be buried or cremated, so a family never comes face to face with the reality of decay. No wonder you are confused about the timeline of decomposition; you are likely to go your whole life without seeing a fully decomposed body! You’ll miss the beautiful colors, but considering you’d have to, I don’t know, stumble upon a dead body in the woods to see them, maybe it’s for the best.

Rigor mortis is the Latin name for the stiffening of the muscles that starts around three hours after death (even sooner in very hot or tropical environments). I’ve been studying rigor mortis for years and I’m still not sure I totally understand the science of it. The muscles in your body need ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in order to relax. But ATP requires oxygen. No more breathing means no more oxygen, which means no more ATP, which means the muscles seize up and can’t relax. This chemical change, collectively called rigor mortis, starts around your eyelids and jaw and spreads through every muscle in the body, even the organs. Rigor mortis makes the muscles incredibly stiff. Once it sets in, that body ain’t movin’ from whatever position it is in.

What laws would you be breaking if you did get a dead human to eat? Amazing fact: cannibalism is not against the law. It’s not criminal to eat human flesh, but acquiring the human flesh (even if the dead person wanted you to eat them) is dangerously close to breaking multiple laws.

But let’s say, by some hypothetical scenario, it wasn’t illegal for you to desecrate the dead by eating them. Is human meat a healthy choice? No. In 1945 and 1956, two researchers analyzed the donated bodies of four adult males, and estimated that the average male offers about 125,822 calories from protein and fat. That number is far below what other red meats like beef or boar can offer. (Yes, you heard me, humans are red meat.)

That’s not to say those precious calories wouldn’t be helpful in a life-or-death starvation situation. In 1972, Pedro Algorta’s plane crashed in the Andes mountains. Some didn’t survive the crash. Pedro, starving, began to eat the dead people’s hands, thighs, and arms. Human meat wasn’t ideal, but this is a seventy-one-day ordeal of starvation we’re talking about. Pedro said, “I always had a hand or something in my pocket, and when I could, I would begin to eat, to put something in my mouth, to feel that I was getting nourished.” In that extreme scenario, Pedro didn’t care that human meat isn’t the best source of calories and protein. He just wanted to live.

Take Chua Chu Kang cemetery in Singapore, which is the only cemetery in the whole country still open for burial. Singapore is so small, geographically, that there is no affordable open land to create more cemeteries. The government passed a law in 1998 that says a person can only be buried there for fifteen years. When your fifteen years is up, your body is dug up, cremated, and stored in a columbarium (a building like a mausoleum, except for cremated remains).