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There have been a number of incidents recently, where residents of homes, and recently a highrise unit, have been found dead, long after they've died. In the highrise case it was a man who had been dead 6 months, and his front door was slightly open behind a locked security screen, giving rise to a
curious neighbour finally checking to see why it was always ajar. It seems a heart attack was the culprit.
The other remarkable one was the high class prostitute who was found dead, 20 months later. The house was locked from the inside, so it appears she died alone, possibly of natural causes.
The idea is simple: There are a number of agencies (private and government) that often pass by every house and home in an area.
Supplying these people with cadaver-sniffing dogs, as used by earthquake incident rescuers, will not only keep the dogs in training but will also reduce the incidences of sad, lonely people dying sad, lonely deaths, unnoticed.
Kitty Genovese
http://www.everythi...de=Kitty%20Genovese
[fridge duck, Feb 16 2006]
Fly on a leash
http://whyfiles.org...ensic_anthro/3.html
[Worldgineer, Feb 17 2006]
Flies in harnesses - they'd take you to the body
Fly_20harnesses
[coprocephalous, Feb 17 2006]
Annotation:
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Um, if someone dies and nobody notices for a few months, why do we care? Some religious thing? |
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No, just common decency. Sounds like you're from New York? |
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I'm serious: this is, in the end, a public expense, and for the one or two people a year (in what, the whole of Australia?), this is simply not something I want the government to spend my taxes on. Let the dead rest in peace, if their neighbors don't care enough to check in on them. |
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I'm serious, too. It's absolutely, fucking reprehensible that our society has come to this pass. Propagation of uncaring attitudes is exactly the reason people can be kicked to death in broad daylight, in big cities, and no-one sees a thing. |
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On a visit to Thailand, about 12 years ago, I was in a taxi on the way to Bangkok airport. There was the semi-clothed body of a man on the road, in the far left lane, against the safety barrier. Traffic was swerving slightly, to avoid the corpse. |
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I asked the taxi driver why neither he nor anyone else was stopping. His stunning answer: "Not my job. Cleaning crew and police will fix it." |
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I was shocked and saddened by the incident. Human dignity should go deeper than that. |
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I saw a cat on a median the other day lying there. I pulled over, ran across traffic to the median to see the cat. It was long dead, as stiff as a rock. I was hoping that it was just injured, and I could take it to an animal hospital, but it had been dead for a few days. I called animal care services and told them, and somebody came out and got it. |
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See, there are caring people out there. It's like the news; all you see is horrible things on CNN, FOX, ABC, etc. That is a small portion of the world, and people don't realize how much good actually goes on. Just because there are apathetic people like DrCurry, it doesn't mean that everyone else is too. For every apathetic person out there, there are 10 more who would do the right thing. |
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That's my rant for the day. |
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Yes, but let's look at the other side of this idea. |
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You've just killed somebody because "they needed killin' ", and you've got the body temporarily packaged pending disposal. |
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It's still fresh, and nobody is the wiser, except for that damn dog. Comes the knock at the door. |
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Life's a bitch, all because you married one, huh, Norm? |
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//but will also reduce the incidences of sad, lonely people dying sad, lonely deaths, unnoticed// No, it won't. Their deaths will still be sad, lonely and unnoticed, but on the bright side, the body will be discovered sooner.
I don't get why a heart attack should be responsible for a door being slightly ajar. |
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One Monday morning many moons ago a friend and I had the inenviable task of going to a bungalow to check up on a guy who'd failed to turn up at his work. Phone calls to his house got no reply, the neighbours hadn't seen him for a couple of days. Very out of the ordinary for him. |
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Looking through a back window we could see a body lying on a bed. Oh heck, this was not looking good. |
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Banging on the doors and windows, shouting on the letterbox got no response whatsoever. Getting worse. |
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We managed to get inside and open the bedroom door, whereupon said 'body' nearly had a coronary when he woke up at last to find us standing there. Poor sod, but he had a sense of humour and the irony wasn't lost on him. He really needed a much louder alarm clock, mind. |
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A sniffer dog could have saved that embarrassment. |
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I knew someone who'd been to Lagos (Nigeria) where he said he saw a dead body on the road with all the traffic just driving over it, not even swerving to avoid it.
Do these dogs go mad when they walk past a morgue? |
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I cast my vote for /common decency / and /human dignity/!!besides I love dogs, too. |
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When I first saw the title of this idea I was put off because I imagined patrols of (vampire, obviously) cadaver dogs, roaming the streets, feasting off the brains of the living. |
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//Propagation of uncaring attitudes is exactly the reason people can be kicked to death in broad daylight, in big cities, and no-one sees a thing.// |
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That's a bit off-track, don't you think? Coming to the aid of those who would be victimized, or *intervening in the process* of //sad, lonely people dying sad, lonely deaths// is one thing. Searching for bodies after the fact is quite another. |
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I read this as a means by which we can shelter ourselves from the truth that many people do die sad, lonely deaths. Ignorance is bliss, right? It is sad to know that a person has died unnoticed, but sadder still is the thought of people dying completely alone while the rest of the world carries on, unaware that this is happening. Sweeping awareness under the rug is an uncaring attitude, taken to the next level. |
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Hey, I'm not proposing to go to New Orleans lengths of abandoning the dead in the streets, but this is not exactly a common problem in civilized areas. |
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If there is a problem here, it is letting people die alone - in any moral scheme, that is much more reprehensible than not finding them once they're dead. |
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You're fixing the wrong problem here. |
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If we're going to have a patrol, let's have one that drops in on people for a nice cup of tea and a chat. That will identify people at risk of death, so they can be cared for properly and not left to die alone, and will also take care of identifying those very few people who die suddenly with no one around to notice. |
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In a fully moral society, that already exists, in the form of family, friends and neighbors. |
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[unabubba]
"Life's a bitch, all because you married one, huh, Norm?" |
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Tsk, tsk, she's a sweetheart, and I expect better of you. |
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[zeno]
The definition of reprehensible is "deserving of reprimand". I think you were looking for a stronger word there. |
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The only way I could see to bun this idea is at least these would be trained, disciplined animals, not the usual untrained surrogates most dog owners have. |
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"Awwww. She just needed her face licked. That was all." |
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//For every apathetic person out there, there are 10 more who would do the right thing.// I'd like to point out that apathy is far more widespread than you realise, [boatcaptain].
Numerous psychological studies have returned results that people, especially when in crowded areas or when "Just doing their job", will remove all of the blame from themselves and stick with the theory that "Someone else will do the right thing, of course they will - what is the world coming to if people don't do the right thing?".
One most shocking case would be the one in which Kitty Genovese was murdered infront of a block of flats over the course of half an hour or so with not a single person coming to her aid. She was stabbed and left for dead, screaming in agony, and when the attacker came back to finish the job (twice) there had still been no calls to the police or tennants going out to try and stop the crime. (Link). Also, I suppose when you stopped to help this cat you didn't happen to notice every 10 out of 11 drivers stopping to see what help they could offer?
Sorry [Unabubba], its a little off topic but I had to say it, but in response to the idea - you would be far more likely to find one person willing to walk a dog through a few streets than 10 people to stop off at a few houses each, to talk with and comfort those living there. |
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No personal slight intended, [normzone]. |
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Yes, it would be nice for everyone to get a visit from friends or family, once every couple of days, but that's unlikely to happen. I guess the basic tenet of this idea is that we can assuage our consciences a little with the observation that we at least find the body before the remains are completely skeletonised by decay and vermin. |
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But government cannot right every wrong, and we should not expect it to. If you really want to pay for assuaging your conscience a little, drop some money in the poor box at church, where it might go to support one of those outreach (visiting housebound people) programs. |
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Maybe I need to watch more CSI, but I wouldn't think a recently deceased body would smell that different from a live one, even to a dog. If the body still has to putrefy/dessicate a bit before its smellable, this would kind of be a step in the lateral direction. |
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As for services to periodically visit shut-ins, they are already baked by local churches and other general do-good organizations. |
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Cadavers begin to give off certain identifying odours within 12 to 15 minutes of death, apparently. Corpse flies can detect a dead animal from more than a mile away, as some gases are released by the early breakdown of blood chemicals. Dogs can detect the same odours, much like the way they can detect cancer by smelling one's breath. |
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//cadavers begin to give off certain identifying odours within 12 to 15 minutes of death// |
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Wow, that's awesome [unabubba]!!! I didn't know you started to smell BEFORE you died. And people say you never see it coming. HAH! |
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//Corpse flies can detect a dead animal from more than a
mile away// so they are even better than the dogs - why
not go around with a fly on a lead? I'm very fond of flies -
they make good pets, are easy to feed, can speak any
language, and when assembled into clusters have more
computing power than the CIA's mainframe, but I digress
stupidly as I am wont to do (+) for your excellent idea UB |
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I know what it means [normzone], I was quoting [Unnabubba] to show how much I agreed. Stronger words than these you will not see me use. It was probably the only time I used the f word. And while I'm annotating anyway: you can't annotate your way out of this one [drcurry] |
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People don't have to be elderly and/or housebound to die and remain unnoticed. A foreign student was discovered in his halls of residence at Southampton University in the mid 1990s who had been dead for 4-6 weeks before he was discovered. |
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I guess in a hall of residence, no-one really noticed the smell. |
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I searched for a webpage I saw once where a cruel/bored teenager superglued thread to flies, but "fly on a leash" turned up the linked site. Cool stuff, and it has the additional ablilty of finding corpses in the woods. |
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zeno: once you're dead, whether you're in heaven, hell or oblivion, you're quite beyond caring whether your body is decomposing in a casket or on the sofa. And frankly, I don't care much either. |
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As I said above, our efforts need to go into caring for the dying, not the one or two unfortunate dead who aren't noticed immediately. |
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Could a carbon monoxide type detector be installed in homes that would inform authorities that corpse gasses are present and give the cadaveranine corps somewhere specific to check out?
Although I imagine that more times than not, someone’s garbage just needs taking to the curb. |
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//And if you think that is a reprehensible opinion, go fuck yourself// [DrCurry] - are you the kind of doctor who is a signatory of the Hippocratic Oath? :-) |
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Nah, he signed the Hypocritic Oath. |
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Cadavers are rare. Why not have drug sniffing dogs patrol around? Or better yet, be taught attack skills and get set loose in semi-feral packs. Marijuana puffers would shudder at howls in the distance. Cocaine traffickers would wear padded clothes and leather neckguards at all times. Heroin users would take to sleeping in trees. Everyone would shape up and fly right! Only the perfidious need fear. |
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