I was warned as a kid not to disturb a bloated animal carcass. That the gas inside could expel and spew nasty stuff on you.
I ask because on Deadliest Catch the Wizard found a bloated Walrus floating. They roped it and dragged it up to the edge of their deck. An Alaskan Native crewman legally harvested a walrus tusk with a sawzall. Supposedly worth several thousand bucks.
I held my breath thinking those guys were going to get sprayed in the face with maggots and rotting flesh. It was at least 10 feet from the water to the boats rail. Thats a lot of force dragging a heavy body up that high on one rope.
As a kid, I came across a dead seal on the beach. It was very bloated and you could see… stuff… oozing and bubbling out of a puncture wound on the stomach. It wasn’t exactly a high-pressure bomb waiting to go off, but you could see where some had spattered a few inches out onto the sand, and I have no doubt that unwise handling could have resulted in all kinds of nastiness getting all over the place.
Of course, like most health warnings, many people are going to survive unscathed even if they ignore the advice… but when it comes to the risk of rotted seal guts all over me, I’ll play it safe. (In fact, it was my impression that the whole thing was too gross even for seagulls.)
A few years ago we cut the head off a dead sea lion. It had been floating for a while but the ocean is pretty cold. When we rolled it over to cut the other side of the neck it made a hissing sound for about a minute but never exploded.
Cold! I never thought of that. :smack: The Deadliest Catch fishes in freezing cold water. The walrus was bloated but probably not rotted like an animal in hot weather. The body wasn’t as fragile.
That probably saved those crewman from a spew in the face.
If you replace “bloated body” with “pressure vessel” it becomes a bit easier to understand. In a body decaying on land, gaseous byproducts cause it to expand until the skin is punctured and some of the gas can escape, allowing the pressure to equalize.
If you disturb a body where the pressure hasn’t been equalised, the change in pressure could be enough to pierce the skin and cause explosive spewing.
On the other hand, a body in the water has probably been gnawed on quite a bit by the local sea life so there’d be plenty of openings for pressure to vent. Also, these folks work in subzero temperatures getting soaked even when it’s not raining, and handle slimy cages, whiny coworkers, while trying to catch as much as possible before hunting season ends. I’ll bet they’ve got pretty strong stomachs, especially after the inevitable pranks.
Depending on the animal, human skin is thicker than the animal’s skin.
I’ve seen and cut a lot of bloated carcasses. The problem is not dragging or cutting through the skin, the problem is accidentally nicking the guts. That is what is mostly bloated in the carcass. Carefully opening the skin will let the guts out, but not really nasty spew.
Another archery site I visit had a long running thread on a bloated dead cow a guy thought would be good target practice. I guess he was covered in rotten stinking flesh.
I remember Matthew Brady’s photographs of the dead after Gettysburg-they were swelled up like balloons-must have been ghastly for the burial details. And the remains of General Custer’s men must have been pretty nasty when the punitive expedition came upon them (most of the bodies could not be identified…of course, crows and coyotes had eaten the bodies as well.
Elizabeth I exploded during her funeral-the coffin blew apart in the church; the smell must have been horrible.
I got a weak stomach and its almost lunch time.