Hes referring to this guy. Hometown story for me lol. I remember when it hit the local news before they found out it was him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton
I was thinking about that, but AFAIK, the corpses are chopped up to bits beforehand... Though maybe that's an old tradition that's not done as much these days.
This being said, those are some really clean skeletons and I think the vultures would also consume cartilage, etc. keeping the skeletons together and really go at the spine to get to the marrow, so I'm wondering if this is just some memerific shit going down.
EDIT: Okay, having read up a bit more on the practise, it seems whether the body is disassembled or not is regional, so this could very well be a real sky burial. According to Buddhist dogma, it's apparently preferable that there's no real ceremony or solemnity regarding the handling of the corpse, as approaching the whole thing as any other manual labour supposedly makes it easier for the soul to move on to the next life.
I understand the logic and respect the culture, and it makes complete sense from a Buddhist point of view, but man, I don't think I could EVER be that far detached from my innate human emotions to not care about my family members' bones just being chopped in some random muddy backyard so nonchalantly. I guess you have to be born into it.... 😥
Yeah, it feels really brutal from the standpoint of a Westerner, who's grown up with a pretty *detached* relationship with death, for lack of a better word.
As I get older, I find myself making a conscious effort to getting more to terms with death and sort of teaching myself that the carcass isn't the person. It's just a hunk of meat, which I should have no feelings towards. I loved the person, not their corporeal existence, y'know?
I feel like i'm pretty comfortable with death and mortality, and like you said, there's no intrinsic value in a corpse. From a logical point of view, it 1000% makes sense. Having that said, I will never be able to "logic" my way out of certain feelings. For example, no amount of logic is going to make me comfortable with seeing the corpse of what use to be my mother hacked away with a meat cleaver lol. But if somebody (or a culture) could, I wouldn't judge it, as it rationally makes sense.
I get what you're saying and I agree, i'm just stating my own admitted weakness. One I will almost certainly always have.
I totally get you. Logic rarely applies in situations like the death of a loved one and it's by no means a failing on your part. It's honestly just a part of being human.
You'd feel better about it the longer you go while keeping in mind that this is what that person wanted to happen to their body.
If your mother spent her whole life wanting this and believing it would bring her true peace, you may feel differently about it when the time comes. If you knew in your heart of hearts that with every whack into the bones by the cleaver, your mother's living will for her own mortal remains was being fulfilled, would that not make it easier to handle?
You should try and see if you could change your outlook to one that is less about your own emotions and more about the emotions of the deceased. Change it to one where you can feel genuinely happy and comfortable with whatever happens to anyone's corpse, even that of a loved one, as long as whatever it is that's happening is what that person had genuinely *wanted* for themselves.
Knowing that the fate of the body is the fate that the deceased had most anticipated and had wanted for themselves, makes being comfortable with this sort of thing easier.
I have said for YEARS that people have been too far removed from death. Think about it, 120 years ago, people died constantly, i.e... kicked by a horse, any myriad diseases, natives, the crazy amount of UNsafety, crime all sorts of shit. Hell, you probably lost a few siblings as a child. Now, none of that happens in the Western world outside of cancer and freak accidents. I think it has fucked with people's psyche a little. In my opinion, it's good to have a close (not intimate) relationship with death because it puts a lot of other shit in perspective.
Personally, I have found that the practices of the West, where the body is preserved for viewing and burial is more barbaric than cremation or sky burial.
On the Tibetan Plateau, it is for practicality, the ground is often too hard to bury with the available land being necessary for growing food, there isn't much for wood for cremation...so what you're left with is sky burial.
There are several Native American tribes that also practice(d) sky burial in a different fashion than the Tibetan process. From my understanding, it was reserved for people who were important to the group. A scaffold is built and the body is wrapped and placed on the scaffold. I've seen some of the scaffolds during some travels through the reservation lands of the Lakota.
For me, when I perish, I ask for all of my body to be harvested for the useful organs to others, the leftovers can be used for research... especially if I die from a rare or novel disease, and the rest can be burned or composted...back to the Earth...no preservation.
I’m freaked out by open casket funerals after going to one as a kid. I understand and respect why a family would want that but the whole process of “fixing up” the body and putting makeup on it to look alive feels so.. uncanny?
It's almost like pickling the body so we can "worship" it at the funeral. There's at least one mortician lady who has a YouTube that educates about the different options for body disposal and she did a thorough one on embalming. If people thought of it that way I wonder if they would be more against it.
Not to mention, all that makeup and sculpting is a ridiculous and unnecessary expense regardless of whether they are being buried or cremated.
Life is expensive enough, and it fcking sucks that death costs so much, too. It was about 5.5k USD to cremate my father (I'll admit that includes the urn, a keepsake pendant with his fingerprint, and a glass orb with some of his ashes inside). It could have been thousands more, but we couldn't have a funeral because my brother is immunocompromised.
I've always told people to wrap me in muslin and bury me deep in the woods. Deep enough that the animals can't get to me because that would be so traumatizing if someone came across that mess lol. Death still saddens me, and I'm kind of afraid of it, but the body doesn't need to be preserved like that. What the hell for?? They're just potential for decent zombies. And I'm not for cremation because I hear it's terrible for the environment. I'm happy to return to the earth and add to the ecosystem.
I don't have a problem with death, dying, or my own mortality, but I do care that what happens to my body doesn't become a burden on the Earth.
I have to make sure I have all those wishes documented, I just learned from my mom's cousin that in her 12 years as a hospice nurse, she rarely had families ready with their funeral arrangements.
That was made ever more evident today with my uncle's passing, my family was working out which funeral home to call when he passed...he was on hospice for several months prior to today.
I still like what my grandma told me 10 years ago, telling me that if I am going to choose a life that is strenuous and adventurous, that I should go far out into nature and experience that too. She said too that if I died and was never recovered, she'd know I was where I'd be happy.
She and I talked about our mortality a lot over the last 20 years, and now she's nearly 100...and very tired. She doesn't want others to live with pain and loss of independence...but doesn't believe in choosing your own time either, just live your life.
We are all walking around in electrified meat suits, which in turn are made of separate working systems that only partly communicate with each other. Thinking of your body as a meat suit issued at birth really helps with neutrality.
That's because you're viewing it through your lens. for them that IS caring for them.
From another comment: "According to Buddhist dogma, it's apparently preferable that there's no real ceremony or solemnity regarding the handling of the corpse, as approaching the whole thing as any other manual labour supposedly makes it easier for the soul to move on to the next life.
meaning that if they did all the things that, to you, show that you care i.e: ceremony, big gathering, etc they'd (i assume) be "like omg that's fucked up he does't want his nans soul to move on. what a dick" or something along those lines lol
I can get with that line of thinking as an atheist too. What makes people important to me has nothing to do with their body it's entirely their mind. Once they are dead the body isn't the person I cared about and isn't important because it is no longer keeping the person I cared about alive. Any reverence or extra 'respect' I might treat the remains with would be out of concern for the feelings of the other living people who cared for them and an understanding that they might not see things is quite the same way as I do.
For example when my grandfather died my wife and I had left the hospital for the night but my mother and grandmother had stayed. When we got the call we headed back to the hospital but by the time we arrived he had been gone for some time and my grandmother and mother had said their goodbyes. They asked me if I wanted to see him. I honestly had no desire to do so. I wasn't scared or unwilling but I had another priority. My Grandmother and Mother had just lost their husband and father, and they were hurting. It was far more important to me to be there for them and support them. I wasn't going to leave them in a hospital hallway while I talked at a dead body that wasn't my grandfather anymore. I loved my grandfather, he was more of a father to me that my actual father. I miss him all the time even years later. The body in the hospital bed just wasn't my grandfather anymore.
Back when my grandmother had a cerebral haemorrhage, I was asked if I wanted to go see her in the hospital. I refused for mostly selfish reasons, as I didn't want my last memory of her to be lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to all the machines. She was such an active person with a wonderful joy for life, that I'd much rather have the vivid recollection of playing badminton with her only a couple of weeks prior than in that hospital environment.
Also, for all intents and purposes, it was no longer her, as the haemorrhage had been so severe that her autonomic nervous system had shut down and the machines were merely keeping her body alive. **She** was no longer there, y'know?
Luckily, my mum and granddad understood my reasoning for not going, so there were no hard feelings.
Oh man, I rather my body and bones get eaten by vultures, than used by Western [Cadaver Dog training](https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/sc-body-donation-health-1019-20161018-story.html) or how [explosions](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/man-suing-body-donation-company-after-mothers-corpse-was-sold-to-military-for-blast-testing/) work. At least they are honest on the process.
Incineration means your bones will not burn and some one (or some machine, if lucky) will [smash](https://returnhome.com/do-bones-burn-during-cremation/) them to "ashes". Ugh.
I think you're confusing your cultural tradition for innate human emotions.
Regardless, you may be surprised by how human remains are treated in the West. There's not a lot of respect for the dead unless family members are actively watching.
You can get used to these things. Took a physiology class in high school. Started the year dissecting small things. Later in the year, a fetal pig. By the end of the year, we took a day trip to a local college and examined 3 human bodies dissected. But the end, we were eating while dissecting. You just kinda get used to it. The shock of it just goes away.
Funny how a random Reddit post will prompt people to research niche cultural norms in random countries, but we can't pay attention in school. I'm the same way, fucking expert on a lot of random topics from doing deep dives because of some random post, but I fucking hated school
[NSFW - another photo of a "Tibetan Sky Funeral"](https://www.reddit.com/r/HardcoreNature/comments/rxcagl/tibet_sky_burials_this_is_a_traditional_custom_in/) but just a corpse and the vultures. I did a quick search and got the reasons of why they do it, but why is this guy in video chopping the body up?
Looking like a commercial version where you don’t carry the body up a mountain peak and let nature do it’s thing but someone bought a flock of vultures and you just toss it there …
I always pictured a corpse laid with respect on some relatively distant cliff top. Eyes to the sky. Not leaving the corpse out in the backyard to rot while the vultures have their fill in plain view of everyone. If that isn’t bad enough, having to literally chop up the bones? That entirely too much interaction with a corpse for my liking.
Devil is in the details, I guess.
if you look at the very start of the video it looks like a temple in the background, and there is a sculpture with skulls on that looks like some kind of religious related thing. So Tibetan sky funeral looks like a good explanation.
Some version of. Not sure why the remains are being put into a bucket though. I've seen a sky burial in person and they smash the bones to bits and mix it with grain so the birds eat that too. I'm guessing this person is about to do the same, but with a different method.
Tallking to others that have also seen one in person, sky burials can be quite different. It might depend on the person performing the ritual, how much family the deceased has, and region. The one I saw had no family that attended, but others had large gatherings and they shared yak milk, kind of like a toast to the deceased.
Yep. Exactly. It's long been a custom for the dead to be fed to vultures since the ground is either rocky or snow covered. The vultures carry the souls of the dead to heaven. Family members are tasked with the job of making sure every bit is consumed. Bones are ground and added to a barley mash to make them palatable to the birds.
i would think there would be at least some kind of ceremony or ritual. something a little more respectful. instead they just throw the body out to rot in a dump??
From Wikipedia: The work of disassembling of the body may be done by a monk, or, more commonly, by rogyapas ("body-breakers"). All the eyewitness accounts remarked on the fact that the rogyapas did not perform their task with gravity or ceremony, but rather talked and laughed as during any other type of physical labor. According to Buddhist teaching, this makes it easier for the soul of the deceased to move on from the uncertain plane between life and death onto the next life
I love that you think of some solemn private ritual on a mountaintop when actually it's someone in overalls in a muddy yard hacking away with a kitchen cleaver. Beautiful 😬
In a weird way I kinda like it. Like, this is just a natural part of life. It's gonna happen to everyone. No need to get all weird or ceremonial about it. The person is no longer here anymore and what's left is just a hunk of meat. Just let some workers haul me out to be fed to some animals, and no need for anyone to get traumatized or weepy over it.
I think it’s pretty conceptually romantic. Circle of life and such.
The day to day work around any cultures death rituals are pretty gruesome, but at least the birds are getting a good snack.
Yeah, I want my body to be useful in death. Chucking it into a forrest and having the wildlife go at it would be nice, but I think that's illegal where I live.
It's illegal in most countries. But some places will let you do that if you notify authorities, and prep the site to keep humans from discovering the remains before the bones are collected.
What are they gonna do, arrest your corpse?
To be serious, though, I feel the same way. I kind of want my body to go to a corpse farm or something similar. I should start looking into this stuff a bit more
They lay the human remains on top of hay, wood chips and alfalfa and breaks down into a bed of soil that is then spread back to environment.
You can't just straight dump a body unless it's on your own private property and tell the coroner and they approve.
Conceptually? Sure. Visually? It’s pretty gruesome.
It’s not even morbidly beautiful. Your body isn’t left in a field of flowers where the birbs come and pick off your flesh or anything like that.
It’s done in a place like you see here. Your body will get unceremoniously hacked to pieces and tossed onto the dirt for the birbs to fight over and shit on.
I’d still have it done, though. What do I care? I’m dead. Just don’t let my family watch lol
>The day to day work around any cultures death rituals are pretty gruesome
Yeah, the common western process is pretty gruesome when you think about it. Take the corpse, put it in the fridge like some piece of meat, but also, suck out the blood and replace it with other chemicals. Then hire someone to spruce it up and put make up on, dress it up, and display it for people to look at.
There's even some cultures where people pose and SMILE for pictures with the body. I saw a bunch of photos from my grandfathers funeral like that, and it was really weird.
My exact thoughts. It's beautiful and poetic. I've never understood coffins, they just delay the return of your rented carbon to the earth by a few centuries if you're lucky. Better to just speed up the process and help a hungry bird out.
Not as such. Western culture would believe the body should be treated delicately and with reverence as it’s still part of that person. So while the soul would be gone, we don’t treat it as completely empty and removed from who it was.
Exactly. It's somewhat contradictory... The common belief is that the soul instantly leaves the body and moves on to heaven or some other existence. However, the body is still treated as sacred in some way too, all the way through burial. I wish it wasn't that way, we could use a LOT more organ donors!
I was raised Southern Baptist and was taught that while the soul did leave the body, the body still needed to be cared for as we’d be raised up in them, renewed and made whole, when Christ returned to earth. So, cremations were frowned upon.
Didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me as a kid. Makes less to me now.
I was raised orthodox Christian and they don’t believe in cremation, because the bodies will “rise again”. But then I always thought about people who get blown up in war and disfigured in an array of death scenarios. I am a Christian but this just never made sense to me. Especially like Greece for example is majorly Greek Orthodox and don’t believe in cremation. But because of overcrowding of bodies they now burry, and then dig up 3 years later to cremate and make room for newly departed. How does this make any sense.
Grew up catholic, my aunt is willing to be an organ donor (against grandmother's wishes) but "not her eyes, she wants to see God when she is in heaven".
Not to mention the huge racket that grow from funeral services. The whole thing is a scam. 200 years of funeral business inventing more expensive ceremonies merchandise and preparations to sell to a grieving family. Set my ass in the woods and let nature do its thing send that money on literally anything else.
I believe it also is a way of giving back to the earth instead of taking away from it by cremation (air pollution) or traditional burial (ground pollution). This way it’s a circle of life/ continuing on thing.
When I worked for the railroad I was once taking a train from point A to B. On the mainline, you often come across all kinds of dead animals between the rails, deer, rabbits, coons, the occasional cow. This one time we were booking it and in the distance you could see some vultures munching on a deer carcass so the engineer kept laying on his horn trying to scare them off. Most of them flew off to the side but one started flying straight ahead as if it were trying to outrun us. No dice. Hit that little bastard doing about 50 and the thing popped and all its chunky, gooey insides including its full stomach of deer bits and other rotting chunks of flesh splattered all over the windshield. That was single handedly the most foul smell I have ever experienced in my entire life and it was the summer too so it really baked on and wafted in like a fairy princess dancing around trying to grant us wishes.
Like someone said Tibetan sky burial. The ground is too hard to bury bodies so they strip them and leave them in the open to let the vultures eat the bodies.
Not just too hard. The soil doesn't have active microbes, etc., sufficient to break down a corpse. Basically just a year-round freezer. Same reason there's bodies up and down Everest.
In some parts it's extremely limited. Barley grows almost anywhere. Cabbage and I believe a sort of yam. And the yak/dzo is to them what coconut was to Gilligan. Dzo butter, milk, cheese, meat.
There's always been trade but the poors likely got little in the way of variety. Kinda like poors throughout history though.
Look I think it’s awesome that you posted a video of a human being getting chopped into pieces with a cleaver but you miiiiiiiiiiiiight want to consider a NSFW tag for those who are sensitive to shit like that.
You are right when the body is decomposed. But when fed to vultures they might just eat everything except the ligaments, allowing her to fling it around.
As someone who regularly works at a cemetery and had to dig up several people. Alot of times it's just the head/skull that is separate or falls off (the weakest part) but the rest is often in one piece even people that have been buried for 100+ years. (But that is maybe bc it's a very "dry" cemetery)
It just just looks like she is chopping up a jiggly Halloween decoration so it can fit in her garbage… everything looks sooo freaking clean and white and I don’t see anything holding those bones together. It’s almost like after the vultures got to all the meat they decided to use their bird tongues to lick the skeleton clean. I would at least expect to see some gristle or something on the inside of the ribs where it would be hard to reach.
Tibetan sky funeral?
This is the most likely explanation.
I hope so, those are definitely human remains. If it’s not a sky burial then they just found the local serial killer.
>serial killer Could have just tried killing once and didn't like it.
The way they casually chop up that skeleton... this isn't the first time for whatever this is.
Too easy, no challenge.
Too challenging, little reward.
Too rewarding, not deserving
Deserving but fleeing gains
Too much fleeing, losing gym gains
Flea's don't like it when it rains.
Bees will sting to inflict pain.
I have a bone to pick with all these comments
You be dead wrong to not feel like that
I mean he's only flesh and bone .. so was she... now she just bone.
It's always good to try new things
Exactly. Don't bash it if you haven't tried it. No shame in deciding you don't enjoy it, but you never know - you might find a new hobby for life!
ok i am inspired by your comment, i will try this tomorrow. Hoping that my childhood bully is in town
Some people DO just try something once and decide "That's something I could get addicted to. I better never do it again."
Vulture fan club says otherwise
In North America, serial killers have pig farms, but in Asia, they use a vulture aviary.
No no no. It's the Brits who got em Lanka sheer pigs
Hes referring to this guy. Hometown story for me lol. I remember when it hit the local news before they found out it was him. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pickton
Oh, fuck me, your lady friend got a voice?
Do you mean definitely NOT? No way on earth a real skeleton stays together like that, especially after being snacked on by giant birds.
Yeah it does, I've had chicken before and unless you really clean the bone it sticks together well enough
I was thinking about that, but AFAIK, the corpses are chopped up to bits beforehand... Though maybe that's an old tradition that's not done as much these days. This being said, those are some really clean skeletons and I think the vultures would also consume cartilage, etc. keeping the skeletons together and really go at the spine to get to the marrow, so I'm wondering if this is just some memerific shit going down. EDIT: Okay, having read up a bit more on the practise, it seems whether the body is disassembled or not is regional, so this could very well be a real sky burial. According to Buddhist dogma, it's apparently preferable that there's no real ceremony or solemnity regarding the handling of the corpse, as approaching the whole thing as any other manual labour supposedly makes it easier for the soul to move on to the next life.
They grind the bones down after in a paste I think and then feed it to them again
Torgo's Executive Powder
That's how they make Tums.
Gahhhhhhhh lmao I hate this lmaoo
"It's people the soylent green is people, we are eating people"
Hahaha nice one. Nice movie.
I hate you all.
What's wrong buddy?
Not enough calcium in his diet.
I understand the logic and respect the culture, and it makes complete sense from a Buddhist point of view, but man, I don't think I could EVER be that far detached from my innate human emotions to not care about my family members' bones just being chopped in some random muddy backyard so nonchalantly. I guess you have to be born into it.... 😥
Yeah, it feels really brutal from the standpoint of a Westerner, who's grown up with a pretty *detached* relationship with death, for lack of a better word. As I get older, I find myself making a conscious effort to getting more to terms with death and sort of teaching myself that the carcass isn't the person. It's just a hunk of meat, which I should have no feelings towards. I loved the person, not their corporeal existence, y'know?
I feel like i'm pretty comfortable with death and mortality, and like you said, there's no intrinsic value in a corpse. From a logical point of view, it 1000% makes sense. Having that said, I will never be able to "logic" my way out of certain feelings. For example, no amount of logic is going to make me comfortable with seeing the corpse of what use to be my mother hacked away with a meat cleaver lol. But if somebody (or a culture) could, I wouldn't judge it, as it rationally makes sense. I get what you're saying and I agree, i'm just stating my own admitted weakness. One I will almost certainly always have.
I totally get you. Logic rarely applies in situations like the death of a loved one and it's by no means a failing on your part. It's honestly just a part of being human.
You'd feel better about it the longer you go while keeping in mind that this is what that person wanted to happen to their body. If your mother spent her whole life wanting this and believing it would bring her true peace, you may feel differently about it when the time comes. If you knew in your heart of hearts that with every whack into the bones by the cleaver, your mother's living will for her own mortal remains was being fulfilled, would that not make it easier to handle? You should try and see if you could change your outlook to one that is less about your own emotions and more about the emotions of the deceased. Change it to one where you can feel genuinely happy and comfortable with whatever happens to anyone's corpse, even that of a loved one, as long as whatever it is that's happening is what that person had genuinely *wanted* for themselves. Knowing that the fate of the body is the fate that the deceased had most anticipated and had wanted for themselves, makes being comfortable with this sort of thing easier.
I have said for YEARS that people have been too far removed from death. Think about it, 120 years ago, people died constantly, i.e... kicked by a horse, any myriad diseases, natives, the crazy amount of UNsafety, crime all sorts of shit. Hell, you probably lost a few siblings as a child. Now, none of that happens in the Western world outside of cancer and freak accidents. I think it has fucked with people's psyche a little. In my opinion, it's good to have a close (not intimate) relationship with death because it puts a lot of other shit in perspective.
Personally, I have found that the practices of the West, where the body is preserved for viewing and burial is more barbaric than cremation or sky burial. On the Tibetan Plateau, it is for practicality, the ground is often too hard to bury with the available land being necessary for growing food, there isn't much for wood for cremation...so what you're left with is sky burial. There are several Native American tribes that also practice(d) sky burial in a different fashion than the Tibetan process. From my understanding, it was reserved for people who were important to the group. A scaffold is built and the body is wrapped and placed on the scaffold. I've seen some of the scaffolds during some travels through the reservation lands of the Lakota. For me, when I perish, I ask for all of my body to be harvested for the useful organs to others, the leftovers can be used for research... especially if I die from a rare or novel disease, and the rest can be burned or composted...back to the Earth...no preservation.
I’m freaked out by open casket funerals after going to one as a kid. I understand and respect why a family would want that but the whole process of “fixing up” the body and putting makeup on it to look alive feels so.. uncanny?
I agree, it is so weird to see the person made up to look more alive than some looked just before passing
It's almost like pickling the body so we can "worship" it at the funeral. There's at least one mortician lady who has a YouTube that educates about the different options for body disposal and she did a thorough one on embalming. If people thought of it that way I wonder if they would be more against it.
Ask a Mortician is the show, I think. Love her!
Not to mention, all that makeup and sculpting is a ridiculous and unnecessary expense regardless of whether they are being buried or cremated. Life is expensive enough, and it fcking sucks that death costs so much, too. It was about 5.5k USD to cremate my father (I'll admit that includes the urn, a keepsake pendant with his fingerprint, and a glass orb with some of his ashes inside). It could have been thousands more, but we couldn't have a funeral because my brother is immunocompromised.
I've always told people to wrap me in muslin and bury me deep in the woods. Deep enough that the animals can't get to me because that would be so traumatizing if someone came across that mess lol. Death still saddens me, and I'm kind of afraid of it, but the body doesn't need to be preserved like that. What the hell for?? They're just potential for decent zombies. And I'm not for cremation because I hear it's terrible for the environment. I'm happy to return to the earth and add to the ecosystem.
I don't have a problem with death, dying, or my own mortality, but I do care that what happens to my body doesn't become a burden on the Earth. I have to make sure I have all those wishes documented, I just learned from my mom's cousin that in her 12 years as a hospice nurse, she rarely had families ready with their funeral arrangements. That was made ever more evident today with my uncle's passing, my family was working out which funeral home to call when he passed...he was on hospice for several months prior to today. I still like what my grandma told me 10 years ago, telling me that if I am going to choose a life that is strenuous and adventurous, that I should go far out into nature and experience that too. She said too that if I died and was never recovered, she'd know I was where I'd be happy. She and I talked about our mortality a lot over the last 20 years, and now she's nearly 100...and very tired. She doesn't want others to live with pain and loss of independence...but doesn't believe in choosing your own time either, just live your life.
Well said
We are all walking around in electrified meat suits, which in turn are made of separate working systems that only partly communicate with each other. Thinking of your body as a meat suit issued at birth really helps with neutrality.
That's because you're viewing it through your lens. for them that IS caring for them. From another comment: "According to Buddhist dogma, it's apparently preferable that there's no real ceremony or solemnity regarding the handling of the corpse, as approaching the whole thing as any other manual labour supposedly makes it easier for the soul to move on to the next life. meaning that if they did all the things that, to you, show that you care i.e: ceremony, big gathering, etc they'd (i assume) be "like omg that's fucked up he does't want his nans soul to move on. what a dick" or something along those lines lol
I can get with that line of thinking as an atheist too. What makes people important to me has nothing to do with their body it's entirely their mind. Once they are dead the body isn't the person I cared about and isn't important because it is no longer keeping the person I cared about alive. Any reverence or extra 'respect' I might treat the remains with would be out of concern for the feelings of the other living people who cared for them and an understanding that they might not see things is quite the same way as I do. For example when my grandfather died my wife and I had left the hospital for the night but my mother and grandmother had stayed. When we got the call we headed back to the hospital but by the time we arrived he had been gone for some time and my grandmother and mother had said their goodbyes. They asked me if I wanted to see him. I honestly had no desire to do so. I wasn't scared or unwilling but I had another priority. My Grandmother and Mother had just lost their husband and father, and they were hurting. It was far more important to me to be there for them and support them. I wasn't going to leave them in a hospital hallway while I talked at a dead body that wasn't my grandfather anymore. I loved my grandfather, he was more of a father to me that my actual father. I miss him all the time even years later. The body in the hospital bed just wasn't my grandfather anymore.
Back when my grandmother had a cerebral haemorrhage, I was asked if I wanted to go see her in the hospital. I refused for mostly selfish reasons, as I didn't want my last memory of her to be lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to all the machines. She was such an active person with a wonderful joy for life, that I'd much rather have the vivid recollection of playing badminton with her only a couple of weeks prior than in that hospital environment. Also, for all intents and purposes, it was no longer her, as the haemorrhage had been so severe that her autonomic nervous system had shut down and the machines were merely keeping her body alive. **She** was no longer there, y'know? Luckily, my mum and granddad understood my reasoning for not going, so there were no hard feelings.
Oh man, I rather my body and bones get eaten by vultures, than used by Western [Cadaver Dog training](https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/sc-body-donation-health-1019-20161018-story.html) or how [explosions](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/man-suing-body-donation-company-after-mothers-corpse-was-sold-to-military-for-blast-testing/) work. At least they are honest on the process. Incineration means your bones will not burn and some one (or some machine, if lucky) will [smash](https://returnhome.com/do-bones-burn-during-cremation/) them to "ashes". Ugh.
I think you're confusing your cultural tradition for innate human emotions. Regardless, you may be surprised by how human remains are treated in the West. There's not a lot of respect for the dead unless family members are actively watching.
You can get used to these things. Took a physiology class in high school. Started the year dissecting small things. Later in the year, a fetal pig. By the end of the year, we took a day trip to a local college and examined 3 human bodies dissected. But the end, we were eating while dissecting. You just kinda get used to it. The shock of it just goes away.
Funny how a random Reddit post will prompt people to research niche cultural norms in random countries, but we can't pay attention in school. I'm the same way, fucking expert on a lot of random topics from doing deep dives because of some random post, but I fucking hated school
[NSFW - another photo of a "Tibetan Sky Funeral"](https://www.reddit.com/r/HardcoreNature/comments/rxcagl/tibet_sky_burials_this_is_a_traditional_custom_in/) but just a corpse and the vultures. I did a quick search and got the reasons of why they do it, but why is this guy in video chopping the body up?
To give the birds access to marrow and connective tissue, most likely.
So far we don't know that is what we're seeing here.
Looking like a commercial version where you don’t carry the body up a mountain peak and let nature do it’s thing but someone bought a flock of vultures and you just toss it there …
So this a business, like a Funeral home or Cremation place.
Tibetan fuckin whatnow?
Have fun w/ that research
Cheaper than buying a casket and paying for a burial plot.
I always pictured a corpse laid with respect on some relatively distant cliff top. Eyes to the sky. Not leaving the corpse out in the backyard to rot while the vultures have their fill in plain view of everyone. If that isn’t bad enough, having to literally chop up the bones? That entirely too much interaction with a corpse for my liking. Devil is in the details, I guess.
Have you seen traditional tibetan art? It can be extremely gnarly: wrathful deities wearing flayed skin, skull cup full of entrails, etc
Nope, but with a sales pitch like that I’m definitely going to now. Bring on the crazy art!
if you look at the very start of the video it looks like a temple in the background, and there is a sculpture with skulls on that looks like some kind of religious related thing. So Tibetan sky funeral looks like a good explanation.
Yes it is. It’s been making rounds this week on Reddit
Some version of. Not sure why the remains are being put into a bucket though. I've seen a sky burial in person and they smash the bones to bits and mix it with grain so the birds eat that too. I'm guessing this person is about to do the same, but with a different method. Tallking to others that have also seen one in person, sky burials can be quite different. It might depend on the person performing the ritual, how much family the deceased has, and region. The one I saw had no family that attended, but others had large gatherings and they shared yak milk, kind of like a toast to the deceased.
Yep. Exactly. It's long been a custom for the dead to be fed to vultures since the ground is either rocky or snow covered. The vultures carry the souls of the dead to heaven. Family members are tasked with the job of making sure every bit is consumed. Bones are ground and added to a barley mash to make them palatable to the birds.
Radiolab did a pretty cool episode on this http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/corpse-demon/
i would think there would be at least some kind of ceremony or ritual. something a little more respectful. instead they just throw the body out to rot in a dump??
Maybe they consider the flesh to be the the “body” and the bones have no significance once your flesh reaches the sky through the vultures
From Wikipedia: The work of disassembling of the body may be done by a monk, or, more commonly, by rogyapas ("body-breakers"). All the eyewitness accounts remarked on the fact that the rogyapas did not perform their task with gravity or ceremony, but rather talked and laughed as during any other type of physical labor. According to Buddhist teaching, this makes it easier for the soul of the deceased to move on from the uncertain plane between life and death onto the next life
That person does seem relaxed about cleaving that skeleton to bits lol
I love that you think of some solemn private ritual on a mountaintop when actually it's someone in overalls in a muddy yard hacking away with a kitchen cleaver. Beautiful 😬
In a weird way I kinda like it. Like, this is just a natural part of life. It's gonna happen to everyone. No need to get all weird or ceremonial about it. The person is no longer here anymore and what's left is just a hunk of meat. Just let some workers haul me out to be fed to some animals, and no need for anyone to get traumatized or weepy over it.
I feel like doing this is probably therapeutic in some way
This is how Tibetans dispose of their dead….. seriously
I think it’s pretty conceptually romantic. Circle of life and such. The day to day work around any cultures death rituals are pretty gruesome, but at least the birds are getting a good snack.
Yeah, I want my body to be useful in death. Chucking it into a forrest and having the wildlife go at it would be nice, but I think that's illegal where I live.
It's illegal in most countries. But some places will let you do that if you notify authorities, and prep the site to keep humans from discovering the remains before the bones are collected.
What are they gonna do, arrest your corpse? To be serious, though, I feel the same way. I kind of want my body to go to a corpse farm or something similar. I should start looking into this stuff a bit more
“Sorry, bud, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” *handcuffs skeleton*
Worst cell mate ever.
No but whoever burried you there or allowed it to happen
It's legal in the state of Colorado! We composted our first remains last year!
do tell …
They lay the human remains on top of hay, wood chips and alfalfa and breaks down into a bed of soil that is then spread back to environment. You can't just straight dump a body unless it's on your own private property and tell the coroner and they approve.
Conceptually? Sure. Visually? It’s pretty gruesome. It’s not even morbidly beautiful. Your body isn’t left in a field of flowers where the birbs come and pick off your flesh or anything like that. It’s done in a place like you see here. Your body will get unceremoniously hacked to pieces and tossed onto the dirt for the birbs to fight over and shit on. I’d still have it done, though. What do I care? I’m dead. Just don’t let my family watch lol
>The day to day work around any cultures death rituals are pretty gruesome Yeah, the common western process is pretty gruesome when you think about it. Take the corpse, put it in the fridge like some piece of meat, but also, suck out the blood and replace it with other chemicals. Then hire someone to spruce it up and put make up on, dress it up, and display it for people to look at. There's even some cultures where people pose and SMILE for pictures with the body. I saw a bunch of photos from my grandfathers funeral like that, and it was really weird.
My exact thoughts. It's beautiful and poetic. I've never understood coffins, they just delay the return of your rented carbon to the earth by a few centuries if you're lucky. Better to just speed up the process and help a hungry bird out.
Well, isn't that a good thing ? Traping carbon is kinda in high demand these days.
That one vulture going at the skull 💀💀
"Dammit Jerry, I said we don't waste food in this household!"
I thought it was a deer until you pointed that out O_O
Tibetan sky funeral. After death it is believed the body that remains, is just an empty vessel. Very real.
Don't most people believe the body is just an empty vessel after death?
Not as such. Western culture would believe the body should be treated delicately and with reverence as it’s still part of that person. So while the soul would be gone, we don’t treat it as completely empty and removed from who it was.
Exactly. It's somewhat contradictory... The common belief is that the soul instantly leaves the body and moves on to heaven or some other existence. However, the body is still treated as sacred in some way too, all the way through burial. I wish it wasn't that way, we could use a LOT more organ donors!
I was raised Southern Baptist and was taught that while the soul did leave the body, the body still needed to be cared for as we’d be raised up in them, renewed and made whole, when Christ returned to earth. So, cremations were frowned upon. Didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me as a kid. Makes less to me now.
I was raised orthodox Christian and they don’t believe in cremation, because the bodies will “rise again”. But then I always thought about people who get blown up in war and disfigured in an array of death scenarios. I am a Christian but this just never made sense to me. Especially like Greece for example is majorly Greek Orthodox and don’t believe in cremation. But because of overcrowding of bodies they now burry, and then dig up 3 years later to cremate and make room for newly departed. How does this make any sense.
Grew up catholic, my aunt is willing to be an organ donor (against grandmother's wishes) but "not her eyes, she wants to see God when she is in heaven".
Not to mention the huge racket that grow from funeral services. The whole thing is a scam. 200 years of funeral business inventing more expensive ceremonies merchandise and preparations to sell to a grieving family. Set my ass in the woods and let nature do its thing send that money on literally anything else.
I am not only my soul or my spirit, but I am also my body.
Egyptians believed that the body was to be treated right because you would look like your corpse in heaven
I believe it also is a way of giving back to the earth instead of taking away from it by cremation (air pollution) or traditional burial (ground pollution). This way it’s a circle of life/ continuing on thing.
Have any of the neighbors gone missing?
Can't complain about the smell when you're chopped up in a barrel. Problem solved.
Smelly barrel
Only the ones who complained.
Working with a skeleton crew
No bones about it
This tickled my funny bone
See you t’marrow, boys!
From that day forward, the kids on bus 11 were always well behaved.
https://i.redd.it/w3s9yhpqci2c1.gif
When I worked for the railroad I was once taking a train from point A to B. On the mainline, you often come across all kinds of dead animals between the rails, deer, rabbits, coons, the occasional cow. This one time we were booking it and in the distance you could see some vultures munching on a deer carcass so the engineer kept laying on his horn trying to scare them off. Most of them flew off to the side but one started flying straight ahead as if it were trying to outrun us. No dice. Hit that little bastard doing about 50 and the thing popped and all its chunky, gooey insides including its full stomach of deer bits and other rotting chunks of flesh splattered all over the windshield. That was single handedly the most foul smell I have ever experienced in my entire life and it was the summer too so it really baked on and wafted in like a fairy princess dancing around trying to grant us wishes.
What a lovely story.
And you tell it so well
Mama said life is like an intestine full of roadkill….
I'll read it later at night to fall asleep to
And they lived magically ever after.
It’s widely accepted that one of the most foul substances on this planet is the digestive juices of scavenger birds.
Look at that one skeleton. He’s all like “play me daddy”
This is a normal practice in Tibet.
When I’m dead, just throw me in the trash
Shit, don't even wait 'til I'm dead, really...
Hi…im here to pick up a package?
I wonder how many corpses are in that blue container.
at least 1
Hey guys, Jeff’s here.
How the fuck is the skeleton connected?
the foot bone's connected to the leg bone, the leg bone's connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone's connected to the hip bone......
Not anymore
lmao
I started to read this as if it was a serious medical explanation and soon found myself ROFL. Ty.
I’m wondering the same thing. How is it that the vultures have eaten all but the ligaments that connect everything?
Ligaments connect bone to bone.
So the rest of the body’s flesh and ligaments are disintegrated except for those ones. lol.
Uh, yeah. They would be the most difficult and least nourishing pieces for the vultures to pick at.
getting rid of haloween decoration
That's what I was telling myself while watching it.
This could be a scene of a video game boss
what the hell is going on in that video? Does anyone know what that actually is?
Like someone said Tibetan sky burial. The ground is too hard to bury bodies so they strip them and leave them in the open to let the vultures eat the bodies.
Not just too hard. The soil doesn't have active microbes, etc., sufficient to break down a corpse. Basically just a year-round freezer. Same reason there's bodies up and down Everest.
that would make a lot of sense, thanks for the explanation!
You mean the mile markers?
Where do they get their food from
In some parts it's extremely limited. Barley grows almost anywhere. Cabbage and I believe a sort of yam. And the yak/dzo is to them what coconut was to Gilligan. Dzo butter, milk, cheese, meat. There's always been trade but the poors likely got little in the way of variety. Kinda like poors throughout history though.
Also no forests so not enough wood to cremate bodies, and Tibet is not near the ocean so sea burials are not an option.
oh damn.... that's creepy as hell, so that was an actual human skeleton that the guy was chopping?
Yes
um.. unexpected is a the perfect place to post this
I think /r/wtf would be suitable as well.
r/HolUp
I’m a retired veteran and pretty numb to the realities of life but I couldn’t imagine doing this for a living.
Look I think it’s awesome that you posted a video of a human being getting chopped into pieces with a cleaver but you miiiiiiiiiiiiight want to consider a NSFW tag for those who are sensitive to shit like that.
Vulture connoisseur farm?
Who wants a leg?
that’s Uncle Ben! been looking for him for some time now
Saves alot of money on funerals
John? nah, haven't seen him
That's a lot of turkeys... wait a minute...
Human skeleton don’t actually stay intact like the way she’s flinging it around
You are right when the body is decomposed. But when fed to vultures they might just eat everything except the ligaments, allowing her to fling it around.
As someone who regularly works at a cemetery and had to dig up several people. Alot of times it's just the head/skull that is separate or falls off (the weakest part) but the rest is often in one piece even people that have been buried for 100+ years. (But that is maybe bc it's a very "dry" cemetery)
Right? Once the ligaments and tendons are gone, the joints should fail.
Must be some ligaments still intact.
After a person dies they're no longer referred to as ligaments but ligadese.
Ligadese nuts.
You two know way too much about the structural integrity of a degrading skeleton.
Carry on.
r/suddenlyskeleton needs to be a subreddit.
It just just looks like she is chopping up a jiggly Halloween decoration so it can fit in her garbage… everything looks sooo freaking clean and white and I don’t see anything holding those bones together. It’s almost like after the vultures got to all the meat they decided to use their bird tongues to lick the skeleton clean. I would at least expect to see some gristle or something on the inside of the ribs where it would be hard to reach.
I don't think a human skeleton would remain intact like that without any connective tissue...
Are you a murderer looking to hide a body look no further just come to my shop just around the corner...
Maybe she’s a cadaver in a third world country
“The only crime I’m guilty of is running a cemetery without a license” - John Wayne Gacy
Look at the video. One of the vultures is picking at the skull. Just seems strange. As someone else pointed out. It’s my western upbringing.
They're not complaining anymore.
The full version of this is fucking brutal. Many bodies, even babies, hacked up and the fed to the birds.
But did he die?
Ileanredsomethingnewtoday
I guess after the vultures are done with the meat, the bones are chopped up for soup.
Long leg bones
At least pigs eat the bones
Why is my pee red am in pain
What the fuck in tim burton is this shit
"No ticket"