All vet students at my school, regardless of their chosen track, spend two weeks with pathologists and pathology residents in the necropsy unit. I just finished this rotation during which I performed necropsies on barn owls, rabbits, dogs, a cat, a sheep, a goat, horses, cows, and a sea lion. We had three sea lions last week and another one this week. I spent two weeks cutting up dead animals, handling their entrails in a modern version of augury.
Necropsies are a systematic examination of the tissues of a dead animal. We are looking for changes in the tissues that might be associated with disease, that might give us a hint as to the cause of death. Sometimes there are no gross lesions (gross meaning we can see them with our naked eye). Sometimes the problems are impossible to miss. But you can't just find the obvious things and call it a day--you have to carefully and systematically examine (look at and often finely dissect) all the tissues to make sure there isn't something else going on that is even more important but less spectacularly obvious. You also have to collect tissue samples for different purposes (bacterial culture, or tissue placed in fixative that will be used to make slides for histopathology).
I did a solo necropsy on a 6-week-old Angus calf this week. Poor thing had severe suppurative pneumonia--his lungs were nearly completely replaced with abscesses filled with thick, greenish pus. After systematically examining all of his tissues and collecting the necessary samples (took me about 45 minutes but I didn't have to collect his brain), I had to dismember him to make it easier to move his remains. And I am here to tell you that even with minimal training and working alone with a single sharp knife, removing the calf's head and four legs completely from his body took me maybe 15 minutes. Someone with slaughter plant experience could have done it in 5 minutes.
Why am I sharing this gruesome information? You may have heard about the terrible ending of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. You may have heard he was tortured and dismembered by a large group of Saudis, recordings of which events the Turks likely have, and which they likely have shared with our morally corrupt government officials. It is entirely in the realm of possibility for a single man, let alone 15 men, to kill a man and cut him into smaller pieces in a matter of minutes.
The politics of Jamal's horrific story are beyond my ability or desire to write about in this particular venue. Instead, I want to underscore the physical brutality of what happened to a man who dared to criticize his own morally corrupt government.
I am required to cut up animals as part of my training and practice of the veterinary profession. Every day in necropsy, it was just as difficult to make the first cut as it was to make the last one. Think how morally empty a person has to be to think it is okay to do this to a human being, not done for any justifiable purpose but to remove a political problem.
The house is burning down around us--all we have to do is raise our heads up and look.
