Present for Pathologist

abysmal-apathy said to @ask-drferox: Hello, doctor! I just watched a video of a vet amputating a dog’s leg and that made me think of a question. What do you guys do with amputated limbs? A whole leg from the hip joint down is a lot bigger than a tooth or a uterus or any other biological waste you might get really. Question tax: What do you think of “Vulure Culture”?

Depends why it’s amputated. If it’s just traumatised, it can go through medical waste like everything else, although there’s no reason you couldn’t send it for cremation or after care like you would a body. It never goes in the sharps container because it’s not a sharp, and those things are not emptied every day and the limb will rot.



If it’s for pathology, such as a suspected tumor, the whole leg is sent to pathology. We then get a polite note from the pathologist informing us that results will be delayed for about two weeks because we sent them a whole damn leg with a bone in it and they have to deal with that.



In regards to vulture culture, I kind of like it and hang around the periphery. I do appreciate a nice animal skull, and would be absolutely on board with having a bunch of skulls on display indicating their evolutionary relationships, and then having some fake, fantasy skulls in the collection to throw people off. However, real skulls are prohibitively expensive to import into Australia so I would have to settle for replicas, and don’t really have the ability to display any at the moment.



So I have a dire wolf skull necklace from the La Brea tar pits that I love, and a couple of fossil pieces, but for now I can’t have any real skulls, as much as I like and appreciate the anatomy.

