Recently, I was honoured to be invited to give an interview for the 'Dead Curious' magazine and podcast. Not only do I love the name, but I was also very impressed by the journalist, Daisy Sanderson, who interviewed me. She had clearly done her homework and asked very insightful questions. Of course, she was asking me about Human Taphonomy Facilities, or 'body farms', and why the UK doesn't have one...yet. We discussed the same reasons that I have mentioned before - the use of pigs as analogues for humans is not sufficient because pigs do not have the same lifestyles, habits, diets or medication that humans do, and the best subjects for understanding human decomposition are human themselves; data from existing facilities in the USA, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands are not always applicable or appropriate to UK forensic cases, because we know that decomposition is very dependent on local conditions. We talked about how HTFs have great potential for being training facilities, not only for forensic scientists, students, military and police, but also for cadaver dogs. And that there are more and more people who would like to donate their bodies to forensic science but who are currently thwarted by a lack of specific legislation.
Read the article here. The podcast episode is coming soon!
Find out more about our HTF4UK campaign, express your views about Human Taphonomy facilities, and support the campaign here.
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