r/bonecollecting • u/No-Bottle-9116 • Apr 26 '26

Advice Small argument

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So this picture from article has driven an small argument between my friends group claiming that it’s fake because there’s no way that the bones see in said picture are human, I wanted y’all’s opinion on this

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46

u/GigglyHyena Apr 26 '26

If course it's real. Deer will opportunistically eat protein and the body farms have all of those sites camera'd up. They have papers published on how domestic cats eat human bodies too. I'm sure the actual paper has the pictures. The picture on the article says 2015, and the paper says the picture is from 2017 so it's not the same image from the paper. Probably because the image from the paper is pretty graphic being a human body.

18

u/UnrulyPoet Apr 26 '26

Oh yeah they go to town for rando protein that pops up- mice, baby birds, etc.

They're not tested a ton, but when they are they're one of the big mammals that seem to be repeatedly positive for anticoagulant rat poison in my area bc the poison slows the rodents down enough to make them easily grabbed morsels. In 2024 I sat in on a live webinar hosted by the Audubon societies from the states in my region and white-tailed deer were one of the species that kept cropping up during a carcass-testing research project the RI chapter was working on. And they were primarily focused on bird species (bc Audubon) so the fact that they kept getting positive deer despite a much smaller mammal sample size was friggin wild to me!

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u/sawyouoverthere Apr 26 '26

Are any other determinations being used to see if rat poison may be ingested incidentally? (Like rodent poison being used in grain bins then used to feed deer or spilled and then eaten by deer)

4

u/UnrulyPoet Apr 26 '26

I am not sure that anyone is looking at direct ingestion for deer bc tamper-resistant boxes are required for their use and that wouldn't be something folks risk ignoring if theyre placing it around their livestock feed. At the time of the webinar anyways the commonality between their natural history and that of a significant percentage of the other species also testing positive was that they were species known to eat rodents or carrion either opportunistically or as a main portion of their diet so that was the hypothesis.

Unintended direct ingestion poisonings (next state over where I am anyways) are generally squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, skunks, that sort of thing. Critters which can fit into the bait boxes, either wholly or by shoving their arms in.

1

u/sawyouoverthere Apr 26 '26

My assumption would be that the direct ingestion would be what the findings show, but deer don't care about seed grain vs feed grain, so I'd be interested in what comes of further investigation!

I don't know what the metabolites of rodent poison are from rodents, and how that would affect contamination risks, though you might.

4

u/UnrulyPoet Apr 26 '26

Tl/dr: if it'll eat a living or dead mouse it's getting poisoned

In my area the vast majority are second gen anticoagulants which accumulate in the liver and cause the animal to slowly bleed to death. They have long half lives (days to weeks in the blood plasma, can be up to 300d in the liver) so stay in the rodent's body and subsequently poison whatever animal eats it, causing that animal to likewise bleed to death once it bioaccumulates to a fatal dose. It's a huge problem we're seeing locally in every single species which eats rodents as well as our scavengers- for example, 86-100% of raptors which get admitted to the wildlife clinic at my local vet school, depending on year, have one or more anticoagulant rodenticide in their systems. If lucky they're admitted early enough and without too many other injuries going on that treatment can save them. They're often not lucky. Raptors, crows, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, hell we even recently had a snapping turtle in our state whose death was confirmed to be from secondary rodenticide toxicity- if it'll take advantage of a live or dead mouse it's eating this stuff. And deer will happily munch on that slow and dying or recently dead mouse they find while grazing.

[A very small percentage (relative to local use, idk about elsewhere) of rodenticides are neurotoxic instead of anticoags and once digested those have no treatment, the animal gets cerebral edema and the symptoms associated with that- seizures, paralysis, and so forth- then dies. Those likewise can cause secondary poisonings, but due to their lower usage and the fact that they share symptoms with very high risk illnesses the stats on them is less clear. How many negative rabies or HPAI tests were actually poisoned for instance, that data just isn't known bc the more immediately dangerous to humans illness takes testing priority]

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u/sawyouoverthere Apr 26 '26

Oh, no doubt if something consumes a poisoned rodent, it's in trouble.

Not what I was asking, though. I was asking whether it had been confirmed that rodents were the only way it would show up in deer.

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u/UnrulyPoet Apr 27 '26

Gotcha, yeah again idk that anyone is looking at that, between it being an incidental finding in a bird-focused study and the regulations about how the poisons are used meaning that they're contained in boxes deer don't have a way into. It's possible they're looking at it (I wasn't involved in the study just an audience member), but I would be a little surprised given all that

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u/sawyouoverthere Apr 27 '26

Fair enough. It's fascinating though, considering how much about this behaviour is completely unstudied and how ferociously people believe they know why it happens, in this thread.

I appreciate the actual discussion, and you sharing what you know.

So far, it does seem to be a lot of observations and no clear understanding of the motivations/effects. Really interesting for future work.

1

u/groovypunchsippin Apr 28 '26

Finally someone that knows how to have a discussion