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Obliteration


Subdeacon Joe

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With a link to the PDF of the gov doc.
https://intrans.iastate.edu/app/uploads/2018/03/Boom-Boom-Boom.pdf

https://taskandpurpose.com/culture/obliterate-animal-carcass-guide-forest-service/

 

‘Stop beating a dead horse,’ is a common expression, but have you ever tried blowing one up? If not, the U.S. government has a helpful guide for doing exactly that. A U.S. Forest Service document from 1995 called “Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives” which takes readers through the process step-by-step. Though it sounds silly, obliterating a large animal carcass is actually very important for safety in wilderness recreation areas, where a carcass might attract bears, or near picnic areas or roadsides where the public might object to a dead animal rotting nearby.

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“Large animal carcasses can be particularly difficult to remove, especially if they are located below a steep cut slope or in remote areas,” wrote Jim Tour and Mike Knodel in the 1995 guide. Some large animal carcasses, like that of a horse or a moose, can weigh more than 1,000 pounds, so good luck moving that deep in the backcountry.


If moving the carcass is too much effort, let explosive chemistry do the work for you. The guide recommends consulting with blasting experts first and, if the situation calls for it, break out the ka-boomy stuff. The guide recommends using fireline explosives, which are “specially developed coils containing explosive powder”  and often used to clear out combustible materials in the path of a wildfire, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

There are two goals that explosives can achieve when used on an animal carcass. The first goal is to disperse the carcass into small enough chunks so that bears or other predators gather nearby, the guide explained. When properly dispersed, smaller scavenger animals can break down the remains “within a few days,” the guide said. However, there are some situations where the goal is not to disperse the dead animal, but to completely obliterate it. That could be when the public is expected in the area soon, or where there are many bears in the area already, the guide explained.

If dispersal is the goal, the guide recommends placing 20 pounds of explosives total underneath the carcass in key locations, then using a detonator cord to tie the charges together. 


“Basically you’re looking at getting the explosive charges on the major bones of the body, along the spine,” a lead blaster (also known as a ‘master blaster’) for the Forest Service named Jim McBreen told Colorado Public Radio in 2012. “If you can get them underneath, that helps also.”

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However, sometimes it’s difficult to place charges underneath the carcass because it is too heavy, frozen into the ground, floating in water, or it simply smells awful.

“The ones that have been out there a couple of weeks, when you come up on them it can really ruin your day,” Nolan Melin, a former backcountry horse packer and trail crew member for the U.S. Forest Service, told the Montana-based Billings Gazette in 2017.

 

PartialObliterationOfAHorse_Header.jpg?auto=webp&width=1440&height=810

 

 

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Horse packers have used the technique for nearly a century.  I've been a participant only once, helping a FS backcountry ranger.  We had to smear Vicks Vaporub heavily below our noses to get near the five-day-old carcass without gagging, but we still gagged a LOT!

Pretty awful!

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