Hmm. It may very well take a large team several hours to remove a kidney under ideal circumstances, Cecil, but its probably safe to assume that in this situation corners may be cut.
Veterinary surgeons don’t frequently remove kidneys (tumors or idiopathic renal haemorrhage being the only conditions springing immediately to mind which would warrant it) and so are likely to be a bit slower with that particular operation than they might be with other more familiar ones.
That said, one thing they’re very good at is ovariohysterectomy - bitch spay, in other words. The ovaries have their own fairly substantial artery (ie not the sort of thing you really want to miss), and are right next to the kidney. Time varies between 10 minutes and an hour, depending on the skill of the surgeon, the size of the hole he’s trying to work through (generally on the belly for better healing) and how big/fat the dog is. Given that dogs are generally longer in the relevant dimension than people, I reckon de-kidneying a person (ventral midline) would probably take me about 30-40 minutes - same as a collie.
<insert link to the sociopath thread here>
A lot of drugs such as GHB will last for quite some time although they could be easily topped up; this could be done by the surgeon himself if they’re not too concerned about sterility.
I’m not saying it happens (its even easier to harvest the organs from some poor south american no-one will miss) but it would be feasible.
The obstacles of donor/recipient matching and disease screening, which are considerable, notwithstanding, wouldn’t it be far easier to murder your victim and dispose of their body in a way which hid the motive? Survivors of a nephrectomy pirate attack are gonna make a lot of noise, we’d have heard about it.
Not a problem for the huge underground industry which guarantees to find you an ideal match by profiling the student population (from skin and hair samples) to create a huge database of potential “donors” from which they can harvest at will via the aforementioned technique, of course
Ah, but we have - hence the conversation we’re having.
How expensive can it be for a multimillion dollar underground industry to pay the occasional respected journalist to state categorically that its an urban legend?
The problem with killing the donor is that you look a bit silly when your very good client comes back to you in a few years with liver disease and you’ve already killed his best match - although obviously once you’ve lost one kidney to a gorgeous stranger you’re likely to be a little more suspicious - you might even hold out for two gorgeous strangers…
Not very expensive at all, unfortunately, and we’re tired of selling ourselves cheap. How much will you pay for us to say stealing kidneys is for real?
