This is correct. And it is the worst smell I have ever experienced. By a long shot.
The daisies in the dell
Will give off a diff’rent smell
Because pore Bossy’s underneath the ground
(with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein II)
should the entire herd of animals go down with a dread disease. they are burned and ashes disposed of. usually supervised by an official type person.
there are many, many pictures of herds and flocks destroyed for mad cow or avian flu, hoof and mouth, etc.
Well, there’s this method.
There was a guy at the state mental hospital where I worked who killed his wife and threw her body to the pigs.
Lets just straighten one thing out right now!!!
You cannot call a slaughterhouse to dispose of sick animals.
You call the rendering works. The send a covered truck that has a winch on it.The critter is winched onto the truck and sent to the rendering works. Several parts of a dead cow are used in one way or another.
OK
One urban legend extinguished.
I grew up on a cattle farm and over time have spent a total of 11 years professionally looking at the wrong end of dairy cows 
Most of the year, the odd dead cow or calf was taken to somewhere out the way and left to rot away. I took care to keep the carcass far away from water courses.
Once, I had a calf died of what I assumed was “Blackleg”. In this case, the carcass is not to be moved to prevent spreading of the bug. So you either bury or burn. As it was summer and the ground was baked hard I decided to burn, but the dry grass caught fire and by the time I got back to the site with the tractor and water there was a 30m circle of ash :smack: We vaccinate against blackleg, this calf must of missed one of it’s shots. As a precaution, I gave the rest of my calves a 3rd dose. (And myself :eek: :smack: )
Most dairy farms here calve only in the spring. (I’d get 210 calved in 6 weeks, the remaining 30 over the next 4 weeks) This is when I’d have the most chance of deaths, say upto 4 cows due to metabolic problems or calving paralysis, and upto a dozen calves born dead for whatever reason. I’d leave the calf bodies somewhere handy, a truck would come past every couple of days and collect anything put out. For cows, I’d have to call so a truck with a crane would come.
But we had to tell them if the animal had been given drugs as then the carcass had to be disposed of after skinning. A zoo had a big cat die a few years ago, it’s death was traced to being fed meat contaminated with pentabarbitone. link I’ve been out of dairying since 1999, so aren’t up with current proceedures.
You haven’t listened to “Cows with Guns” (lyrics only) have you? 
And now for something completely different… A method of Elk carcass disposal
Dave
dynamitedave, your name suggests a good way *not *to dispose of cattle carcasses. Maybe not so bad with a cow as with a whale, but still.
David Simmons, did you work at the hospital in Cherokee? My uncle worked there in the 80’s and 90’s. I believe you’ve lived in California for some time, so your time wouldn’t have overlapped with his at all.
AuntiePam, I’ve run across the practice of putting quicklime on carcasses (or corpses) before. Could someone tell us if the purpose of this is to speed decomposition, hide the odor, or what?
Yeah, the whale story was part of the “Things you don’t want to be famous for” lecture at dynamite school 
Dave
[QUOTE=zaglobaDavid Simmons, did you work at the hospital in Cherokee? My uncle worked there in the 80’s and 90’s. I believe you’ve lived in California for some time, so your time wouldn’t have overlapped with his at all.[/QUOTE]
Yup. I worked there as a painter in the summer and fall of 1940. We painted the exterior metal work on the main building and went into the wards to paint interiors. The place now is not anything like it was in 1940.
I work for the aforementioned rendering company and have an unhealthy depth of knowledge on the afterdeath of all manner of animals.
There is a charge for the pick-up of Bessy / Flossy / Porky, which is why a few farmers choose the “let nature do it’s thing” method.
The temperatures used in rendering are up there so there is no problem rendering animals the died through illness. BSE is the only one that is cause for concern and there is a lot of regulations in place (and more on the way) to prevent contamination of feed products.
What happens to Bessy when we get her?
She is cut up or pulverised then cooked in large rotating vat. The grease is pulled off and the solids are ground up.
Uses for byproducts are various, anything from boiler fuel to lipsick.
I’ve seen both extremes on the hog side of things. In most area’s, a farm will use one of four options: 1. Dead Hole , 2. Rendering, 3. Incinerator and 4. Composting.
1 and 2 have been quite well described previously. However, in many areas dead holes or ‘letting nature take its course’ is illegal. Rendering service is not available in all areas, and is a biosecurity concern for a high health farm. Incinerators can be quite effective, but with the price of LP, they’re expensive, too. Composting has become quite popular. It’s cheap and very effective.
One of our farms lost a huge number of sows a couple years ago due to an electrical failure. In that case, we called a rendering service.