Let’s say you have a pet dog, cat or other animal(s) that roam around your home. You die in their presence but no one else’s.
Q1: Would you be OK (obviously as you think about it now) with them scavenging flesh off your dead body?
Q2: Would you be open to adopting an animal that you knew had partaken of human flesh in a similar situation?
Disclosures:
Q1: I’m totally fine with that.
Q2: Also no problem.
Other: By virtue of my profession I see this scenario on a regular basis. And far more often than not the pets eat their deceased owners
This is a bizarre question, but okay. I would have no objection to my beloved dog feasting upon my corpse to survive. I just hope he isn’t enthusiastically thinking to himself, “I should have done this years ago,” as he sups upon my mortal coil.
I’d not about to adopt another dog any time soon, but if I liked the dog, I don’t think I’d let the fact that it ate it’s previous owner stop me. Poor little guy needed to survive.
I think I might be hesitant if the shelter told me that.
It’s like saying Mother dog was so hungry she ate her dead puppies.
There are some things we all know logically, that has surely happened. Gross nasty things. We put them in a file way back in our brains.
But if it’s so common, like you say, why bring it up at adoption.
Unless you die, and a dog knows what deceased smell like, you’ll be fine.
If you see him sitting at the dining room table with his napkin tied around his neck, looking at you, licking his chops, don’t lay down too long.
My dog eating me? They’d have to fight off the cats.
There is something about adopting a pet that might now see you as food that is a bit disturbing to me. Not sure about the size of the dog would matter to me though. Big bites vs lots of nibbles? Neither sounds good to me.
I dunno. One is my cats is a really picky eater. I’m pretty sure she’d starve before eating me. She doesn’t like food that solid. And she doesn’t like to eat at all unless there’s a live human watching her.
And no, I’m not being sentimental. She’s starving herself to death, and we spend a lot of effort trying to coax her to eat. The vet thinks she has cancer, because she’s lost so much weight. And she probably does. But her eating disorder is part of the problem. Gabapentin helps her appetite.
Whatever’s wrong: I’m sorry that both you and the cat are having to go through that.
I hope something gets to eat me after I’m dead. If it’s the cats and/or dog, that’s OK; I’d a whole lot rather that than that they starve.
If I knew I was adopting a survivor of that situation: I suppose I’d want to know their reaction if I lay down on the floor and stayed still for a bit; but if they didn’t do anything threatening, I wouldn’t worry about it. As others have said, they can recognize the difference between a dead body and a living one; and they behave differently towards corpses.
Yeah, I’m sure Baba (a different cat, we are up to 4, now) would eat my corpse. He’d poke at me, first, to try to get me to respond. And he might even miss me. He’s a very cuddly cat, and really craves attention. But he’s also always interested in food. And Pippin is very practical. He might be the first one of the four to figure out how to use this novel food source. He’s the only one who kills vermin, jumps on the counter to get at people food, etc. But once he started tucking in, Baba and Merry would quickly follow.
And no, I wouldn’t mind being eaten by my dog, cat or some random maggots. I also wouldn’t mind taking a dog that’s eaten its former owner, that’s all just nature.
To be fair, you’d have to eat the cat while it was still…fresh. You don’t get a lot of time to work up to it. Ideally it would drop dead after a bit and you are really, really hungry.
I don’t think I could do it. Not because it is a beloved pet (although that certainly counts) but rather because it is too gruesome for me to contemplate. That said, I’ve never been really starving either so who knows?
But if all those were true, sure, i would eat one of my cats. And as i said above, if i were to die, tapping my cats without other food, i certainly hope they would eat me. Hopefully, that would suffice until some other human came by and reached them.
If the alternative is starving, sure. Make sure to cook it well if possible (because see below).
Otherwise, I’d say not; if only because most causes of death would mean the deceased wasn’t healthy when last alive, and it’s a bad idea to eat meat from anybody who wasn’t healthy. But also because, I don’t wanna.
??
Is that one of the theories about what happened to them? Or is there something known to have happened before they disappeared that I either never knew or have forgotten?
