Slitting a bad guy’s throat seems to be the mode du jour of dispatching bad guys silently in most movies, books and computer games I’ve read.
Whenever I’ve seen it there never seems to be as much blood as I think there should be. After all, the villain is getting large arteries in their neck cut.
On the face of it, cutting someone’s neck open sounds ti me like it’d be far too messy for anyone outside hollywoodville to use.
Or am I wrong?
Depends how it’s done I guess.
Cutting the front of the throat just severs the windpipe. If it’s done right the combination of swelling and partial collapse due to the cartilage being severed will cause the victim to choke. This is prety slow but wouldn’t be very bloody. Of course many people have had here throat cut in this way and picked themselves up after 10 minutes and walked to help. It’s not very efficient.
Cutting the major veins would be very messy, and could also be pretty slow and noisy. A large portion of the person’s blood has to be drained before they die. This is the method used when slaughtering animals for halal food for example to drain as much blood as possible. Definitely messy.
Cutting the carotid artery is very fast. It basically cuts off blood flow to the brain. Because it’s fast it can also be fairly neat. A bit of blood will be lost before the heart stops beating, but not necessarily the gallons lost when the veins are severed. Still I suspect you’d still lose a noticable amount of blood. Of course if the trachea were also severed it might just drain straight into the lungs.
Family reunion coming up?
Silentgoldfish, I want you to stand in front of this mirror here. Good. Now hold still, this might sting a bit…
(sorry)
Bryan Ekers: LOL (and I normally hate that expression)
After having seen a film in which throat slitting was shown at least twice, we are curious: how “splurty” would the blood flow be in those scenarios?
What if you have really high blood pressure?
[semi-serious grin]
I’ve seen pictures of the crime scene where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered (she died from having her throat cut - so much so that she was nearly decapitated). It was VERY bloody.
Arterial blood spurts (basic first-aid training speaking here). It can spurt several feet, in the case of a healthy individual and a major artery being severed. It may stop spurting fairly rapidly in the case of the carotid, but, IMO, it’s going to be pretty messy.
Although I’ve not read it myself, my dad was telling me that in the a book by Andy McNabb (SAS soldier in Iraq during the war) that the one quick slash you see in the movies is fake… in reality it’s a messy job when you have to cut several times…
Like plnnr said, you did see the Bundy Road photos, right?
We were giving a horse an IV once and I’d guess the blood shot 15 to 17 feet when we inserted the needle. Much of the volume the heart is capable of initially passes right through there.
Re: arterial vs. venous bleeding:
I was always taught in First Aid classes how extremely dangerous arterial bleeding was–if you saw that the wound was spurting blood, the victim was in BIG trouble … otherwise, it was just bleeding from a vein, which wasn’t so bad.
Years later, my dad, an MD, told me that, in major trauma cases, venous bleeding was much worse: arteries, though they spurt, will close themselves off a bit after they are severed; veins will ooze forever. So in the long run, venous wounds can result in much greater blood loss.
Of course, the other half of the story is that, whenever you see arterial bleeding, the wound is generally going to be deeper (and hence the damage to all tissues will be worse) than the superficial venous/capillary bleeding we’re all used to seeing from countless childhood injuries.
I was the game designer of the original Rainbow Six. Being a Clancy game we were pretty focused on realism. We considered letting the player slit the bad guys’ throats until our technical advisers (who were uncomfortably familiar with the scenario) talked us out of it.
They basically said that shooting someone is almost always much neater, safer, and quieter than slitting someone’s throat. Apparently it’s a big gory mess and unless the first cut is perfect you’ve left with a thrashing, bellowing, enraged enemy. Even with a perfect cut it takes someone about ten seconds to lose consciousness – that’s a long time to hang on to someone who is panicked and struggling. One guy said he’d only do it as a desperation measure – certainly not as part of their standard operating procedure.
I’ve read that, if you are in the position to slit someone’s throat (right behind them with a knife while they are unaware), it is better to stab the knife downwards into the chest, inside the collarbone, and then jerk the knife back along the inside of the collarbone. It will achieve the same purpose as cutting the carotid in the neck, but not as much blood leaves the body.
Well, speaking as someone who has only slit throats while hunting, I can say it is very messy. If the animal is alive, it isn’t necessarily easy either. And you have to have a pretty decent knife too. After my first hunting trip and I had to slit a deer’s throat, I pretty much decided that slitting people’s throats was pretty much a thing of movies. It’s too messy and difficult otherwise.
Yeah, I have seen the Nicole Brown Simpson pictures, but I never really counted it as a “typical” throat cutting example because it was near decapitation. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that most slit-throat wounds don’t go more than halfway through the neck.
Thanks for the responses.
On a tangentially related note, I always thought that the guys who studied blood spatter stains had an interesting but very morbid job.
Sounds like it would be cleaner and easier just to do the old neck-breaking head twist thing:D
Blake’s excellent summary fits very well with my own experience, having helped to dispatch an old ram which was needed for dog-tucker.
The girl doing the actual cutting used a curved knife, which she dug in point first at the side of the throat, then cut across the whole width of the ram’s throat. It was definitely not a ‘quick slash’ - she needed quite a bit of effort, even with a sharp knife.
With the whole throat open and the animal on its side, the blood just poured out as if from a bucket. A lot of the blood was being absorbed into the earth, so I imagine that if the process had been done on a tiled floor, the volume of blood there would be rather startling.
With no blood to the brain, the ram was technically ‘dead’ very quickly, but it was some minutes before the involuntary muscle twitches stopped; at times these were quite strong and you could be forgiven for mistaking them for a conscious attempt to flee or attack on the part of the animal.
Although this was the only example I’ve seen, I believe it was typical of a ‘professionally’ done job, i.e. done quickly and efficiently. As already mentioned above, however, it’s nothing like the movies. To kill the animal as quickly as this needed the throat to be opened much wider and deeper than that ‘quick slash’ could ever do.
It should also be clarified that the victim ‘bellowing’ isn’t really a problem if the traca is severed below the larynx. The most sound that can be produced in that case is a whistle. Still a lot of potential for threashing around, but a lot quieter than a gunshot.
What about stabbing into the back of the neck between the vertebra?