I mean, if an elephant dies what do they do with the body?

  • w3dd1e@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I have direct experience with this.

    In college, I got a job on campus in their Environment, Health, and Safety department. Mostly, I just calibrated fume hoods in labs.

    During my time there, a hippo at a nearby zoo passed away. I don’t want to be too specific because it can be a bit icky, but they essentially shipped it to us for incineration.

  • Delphia@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 hours ago

    A local zoo has a “taxidermy department” and noteworthy animals are preserved or skinned and the skins sold to friends of the zoo.

    Its kept very secret because it would be publicly unpopular. A friends dad has a mountain lion skin because he is a contractor who does a lot of work for the zoo and did a few jobs for them that NEEDED to be done basically for cost when they were suffering some financial troubles. They gave him the pelt as a Xmas present.

  • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
    8·
    8 hours ago

    My zoo buries them on the premises. I know of a camel, a moose and a few other things got buried there. They have a large plot of land that is used to dispose of organic waste like branches and trees, old compost, etc until it’s full and needs to be tricked out to the landfill. They just bury the animals under the ground there.

  • ValiantDust@feddit.org
    65·
    16 hours ago

    I think I remember some years ago a zoo fed a dead giraffe to the lions and people went absolutely insane about it. I’m not sure about the details anymore, they might have killed it because there wasn’t enough room in the zoo for it? Either way I didn’t get it, what do they think the lions are fed any other day? Animals that weren’t killed explicitly to become food? Some cows that couldn’t bear existence on this world anymore and offered themselves as lion food? Where is the difference?

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
      3·
      8 hours ago

      The zoo near me a few decades ago had an accident where a lot of their reindeer got pregnant before the male could get neutered. They kept all the female offspring but they couldn’t risk having two males in the same enclosure and no nearby zoos needed male reindeer or also couldn’t accommodate them so they had to put them down and ended up feeding them to the carnivores in the zoo.

    • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
      8·
      10 hours ago

      I remember that, I thought it was poetic. I also remember the pearl clutching outrage.

      Though a few visits ago at my local zoo two of the orangutans were beating the shit out of a seagull for fun, with naught outrage.

      So there’s probably a double standard built-in.

    • Smoogs@lemmy.world
      141·
      15 hours ago

      Considering how much meat is required to keep a lion fed per day, part of me thinks feeding it to lions would be sensible but on the other side it depends on making sure the meat is cleaned and that the animal that died didn’t die of a cause that would cause internal damage to the lion. Lions on the Serengeti feed on freshly caught food so their catch is usually pretty clean.

      • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15·
        13 hours ago

        You’d expect the zoo staff to be fairly aware of the state their animals are in. They usually have vets coming in to check on every critter regularly.

  • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
    71·
    18 hours ago

    When I was in college the biology department got donated half of a lion for dissection by veterinary students. We got the back half. I feel like that said something significant about the quality of my education.

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
    211·
    18 hours ago

    There’s an urban legend in New York City.

    One day, a patrol car in the Bronx finds a headless body laying in the street. The victim’s hands, feet, and skin was removed. There’s a massive response to find the deranged killer. Everything gets called off in a few hours, after the coroner realizes that it’s the body of a gorilla.

    There was a hot dog factory in the area.

    • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
      21·
      18 hours ago

      So what was the pretended point of the story? They were transporting the skinned gorilla body to be used in the hot dog factory and it fell of the truck or what?

    • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      16 hours ago

      For a similar story, which isn’t a urban legend. My mother used to be the main resource for an archeological information center in the US Southwest. When work crews dug up a body, she’d get a call from the coroner to ask, “is it yours or mine?” While both are going to want to know the cause of death, the coroner isn’t going to open a criminal case for a Native America burial.

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
        1·
        13 hours ago

        Sounds like the start of a Tony Hillerman [author] Joe Leaphorn mystery. Someone finds a body that looks like it’s a Native American ritual burial, but it’s not…

        [see TV show ‘Dark Winds’]

  • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    18·
    17 hours ago

    What do you do if you have a horse that dies or has to be put down? You call your neighbor down the road who has an excavator and ask him to dig you a horse sized hole. Then you bury it. If you don’t, you won’t want to leave your house for at least a week.