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

by Caitlin Doughty

Somehow, a dog being anxious and overwhelmed makes us feel better about the whole corpse-eating thing. We develop bonds with our pets. We want them to be upset when we die, not licking their chops. But why do we have that expectation? Our pets eat dead animals, just like humans eat dead animals (okay fine, not you vegetarians).

Food is food and you’re dead. Let them enjoy their meal and go about their lives, now with a slightly macabre pedigree.

Most of the conditions that will kill Lisa come from the lack of air pressure in space. The human body is used to operating under the weight of the Earth’s atmosphere, which cradles us at all times like a planet-sized anti-anxiety blanket. From the moment that pressure disappears, the gases in Lisa’s body will begin to expand and the liquids will turn into gas. Water in her muscles will convert into vapor, which will collect under Lisa’s skin, distending areas of her body to twice their normal size. This will lead to a freaky Violet Beauregarde situation, but will not actually be her main issue in terms of survival. The lack of pressure will also cause nitrogen in her blood to form gas bubbles, causing her enormous pain, similar to what deep-water divers experience when they get the bends. When Dr. Lisa passes out in nine to eleven seconds, it will bring her merciful relief. She will continue floating and bloating, unaware of what is happening.

This same thing could happen in space, where shuttles to Mars have to pass the orbiting corpse every trip. “Oh geez, there goes Lisa again.”

The bones are obtained from people who couldn’t afford cremation or burial—not exactly ethical sourcing.

Here is a short, but awesome, list of things that have been found preserved in amber: a roughly 20-million-year-old male scorpion dug up by a farmer in Mexico, a roughly 75-million-year-old set of dinosaur feathers found in Canada, a roughly 17-million-year-old group of anole lizards found in the Dominican Republic, and a roughly 100-million-year-old insect (now extinct) with a triangular head that could turn around 180 degrees—something no modern insect is able to do. There’s even a chunk of amber that holds a roughly 100-million-year-old spider paused in mid-attack on a wasp.

When you’re alive, your blood is made of different components mixed together. But when the blood stops moving, the heavier red blood cells fall slowly out of the mix, like sugar settling to the bottom of a glass of water.

Livor mortis is the first color change you’ll see in a dead body during the first several hours. But there’s a whole new fabulous bouquet of colors waiting to blossom about a day and a half after death.

In fact, the things we do to dead bodies to prevent them from decomposing can do more damage than just letting the bodies decompose naturally. Often buried bodies are placed in a thick hardwood or metal coffin, chemically preserved, and buried very deep, six feet or more down in the soil. The idea is that it’s safe down there, for both the body and everyone else. But the metals, formaldehyde, and medical waste may do more harm to the groundwater than the body they’re trying to protect.

Again, unless you are washing a body that died of ebola or cholera (probably not), or live next door to a Civil War–era cemetery (slightly more likely, but still, probably not), you aren’t in any danger of your water being corpse-contaminated.

We consider it morally wrong, something practiced only by the most diabolical serial killers and Donner Party members.

Again, humans just don’t provide enough calories to compete with something like a mammoth, which would have provided a (totally worth it) 3.6 million calories. In addition, almost half the calories in a human come from fat. Humans aren’t even a heart-healthy option! We’re all-around bad eating.