Please do not combine this with the other thread on Who owns my garbage? as it is about animals, not law.
… never mind… I didn’t read far enough on the other thread, where pigs were cited.
Musicat
September 26, 2009, 1:33pm
3
Perhaps this detail may help explain the story, which looks like the one Gfactor found:
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, August 1935. In a complete failure of source accountability, a nurse at Moe Hospital discarded a radium needle into the trash.
The hospital authorities knew just who to call: Drs. Buchta and Barber, the well known radium hunters operating out of the University of Minnesota.
These modern day Nimrods quickly tracked the hospital garbage and, they hoped, the radium needle to a trash site at a nearby pig farm. Buchta and Barber meticulously surveyed each rubbish pile, but their radium hound, a gold leaf electroscope constructed, appropriately enough, from an ash can, detected nothing. Then, without warning, the gold leaf suddenly flattened against electroscope rod! The hound had the scent! But just as suddenly the trail went cold, and a repeat measurement showed nothing! Puzzling the matter over, the frustrated hunters realized that the discharge had occurred just as a herd of pigs had been passing by. One of the swine must have swallowed the source. Irradiated pork on the hoof!.
Buchta and Barber weren’t exactly dealing with a needle in a haystack, but it was close, and they had before them a task worthy of Hercules. Rather than measure each of the 500 pigs one at a time, Buchta and Barber instructed the farmer, F. L. Tibbles, to divide the herd into five groups. The hound quickly traced the source to one of the five and that group was subdivided further. After a few more iterations, the unlucky animal had been located.
By this means, and with a little help from a butcher, Buchta and Barber brought home the bacon.
So the pigs weren’t employed to find radium, they just happened upon it and ate it with other stuff.
Perhaps Gfactor has verified the story, but I don’t know if it is true or not.
Gfactor found it, but Cecil wrote it, and there’s some very very nit-picky editors who help fact-check EVERYTHING before the column appears.
…they built a Tower?? What am I missing?
samclem
September 26, 2009, 11:12pm
6
NImrod today means “hunter.”
“He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.” (Genesis 10:9)
Derleth
September 27, 2009, 3:56am
8
Then Bugs Bunny called Elmer Fudd ‘nimrod’ and now it means ‘moron’.
If pigs eat radium they also eat oldfashioned lead-acid AA batteries, and cans of tasty paint, and old mice arsenic baits.
Gfactor
September 27, 2009, 3:30pm
10
I posted about it here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=11597158&postcount=15
And I did inded miss a key point of the story. The pigs found the radium because they lived at the dump and had eaten it before the radium hunters arrived.
Musicat
September 27, 2009, 3:36pm
11
Hospitals seemed to have a hard time keeping track of where their radium is. My family has a story, ca. 1935-1945, of my father looking for a lost radium needle in a hospital. They called him because he was someone they knew who had built a homemade geiger counter as a college project.
He found it.
Musicat:
Hospitals seemed to have a hard time keeping track of where their radium is. My family has a story, ca. 1935-1945, of my father looking for a lost radium needle in a hospital. They called him because he was someone they knew who had built a homemade geiger counter as a college project.
He found it.
If they had used their fluoroscope, which presumably they had to go with the injections, they could have spotted it right away.
Musicat
September 27, 2009, 4:38pm
13
Unless it was a very portable fluoroscope, it might be hard to use it when you don’t know where in the hospital to start looking. In the laundry? In the hall? In a patient?
My father’s geiger gadget was a hand-held device.