Indentify My Innards!

May 3, 2006 6:03 AM

My brother found....uh.....something......under his deck. What IS it? (NSF People with weak stomachs)

Pictures: Image 1 Image 2 (Sorry, no resizing, I couldn't stomach looking at them long enough to do it.)

In my brother's words:

"My guess was that it was a placenta/embyros from something that gave birth under there. My coworker thinks the thing on the left looks like a stomach, and the other thing resembles intestines. If these are some animal's entrails, how did they get there so cleanly without other carnage around? There's a little blood on the rocks, but I found it just as depicted. Any idea on species? I live in central NC."

posted by emptybowl to Grab Bag (24 answers total)

I think those are entrails (a placenta would look like a blood pancake, since that's basically what it is.) As for how they got their bloodlessly, this is anecdotal, but last week, I found a severed duck's head in my yard. No blood. No feathers, just a clean, bodiless duck. Later, my husband found evidence of a dog v duck struggle on the far sidewalk, so my guess would be whatever pulled out the entrails carried them under the deck. Secondary crime scene and all that.
posted by headspace at 6:09 AM on May 3, 2006

got their = got there. Oy.
posted by headspace at 6:10 AM on May 3, 2006

I second the entrails assessment. As headspace said, many animals will drag their food to safe places before they eat it -- perhaps a raccoon, a fox or a coyote or a dog, or a cat.

I think that if it was something that hadn't been freshly killed, if whatever brought it there was scavenging, then it wouldn't necessarily be very bloody at all.

As for the headless duck, headspace: probably dropped by an eagle or a hawk or something.
posted by penchant at 6:17 AM on May 3, 2006

er, headless duck = duck head.

yeah, it's early.
posted by penchant at 6:20 AM on May 3, 2006

(Not that I need to see it or anything, but image 1 doesn't work.) Looks like what you'd find if a cat was interrupted eating a squirrel. The lack of blood fits with a meticulous predator taking its time and enjoying the meal, avoiding the poopy entrails or maybe saving them for last. My cat usually starts with the head and works through the crunchy bits first. I once walked into my bathroom to find the neat back half of a bunny sitting on the floor, just the butt and legs with not a drop of blood anywhere to be found. The kitty looked very satisfied with himself.
posted by mediareport at 6:24 AM on May 3, 2006

I fixed the image 1 link. When I had cats we'd find little guts around the house all the time, just lying there as if they had spontaneously generated from the ground, bloodless. I think you have an intestine (bad tasting, full of poop) and a stomach/kidney (similarly bad tasting, I think) of some animal.
posted by jessamyn at 6:32 AM on May 3, 2006

yeah definitely looks like the kinds of animal insides our cats leave lying around. like jessamyn said.. these things dont taste good.. but a cat will clean it up real nice before walking away from it.
posted by trishthedish at 7:06 AM on May 3, 2006

I once walked into my bathroom to find the neat back half of a bunny sitting on the floor, just the butt and legs with not a drop of blood anywhere to be found. The kitty looked very satisfied with himself.

Reason # 23,093 to hate cats. They'll murder us in our sleep and they'll be very neat about it.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:24 AM on May 3, 2006

what jessamyn et al said -- a cat gutted some animal, those are its leftovers
posted by matteo at 7:24 AM on May 3, 2006

Whoa. It reminds me of the Alien (from the first movie).
posted by davidmsc at 7:49 AM on May 3, 2006

Definitely a cat or some other predator of small furry things. Add me to the list of people who have found random intestinal bits. The scarier part is that my parents' cat has white fur below her mouth and on her paws and I've never seen any blood on her.
posted by mikeh at 7:54 AM on May 3, 2006

I've never been so glad that "under his deck" wasn't a euphemism.
posted by deadfather at 8:07 AM on May 3, 2006

There isn't that much blood in most small mammals, and if the critter was dead due to spinal or head trauma, (which is why cats and dogs shake their toys) there might not be that much bleeding out. Our cats' kills tend to be relatively bloodless, intact corpses that have been battered to death.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:09 AM on May 3, 2006

I have no idea what that is or how it got there, but I would like to join the chorus of "OMG that is the most horrible thing I've ever seen."
posted by ImJustRick at 9:33 AM on May 3, 2006

The second picture, especially, looks very familiar to me. A former cat of mine, an accomplished hunter now long gone, used to leave deposits of entrails like that laying around after killing small mammals. My theory was that the stomach and intestines just weren't all that tasty compared to the rest of the unfortunate victim. Unpleasant to tread on barefoot, when still half asleep, first thing after getting out of bed in the morning...
posted by normy at 10:01 AM on May 3, 2006

I just wanted to mention that I misread the question, and thought the brother had found these entrails under his desk.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:10 AM on May 3, 2006

I agree that they are entrails, but I feel like noting that the second blob in the first picture looks remarkably like a dead jellyfish.
posted by Citizen Premier at 10:21 AM on May 3, 2006

What Faint of Butt said.... Our cats leave entrails on our front porch ("It's a present - for YOU!" they insist) all the time. But if your brother had found them under his desk...ew!
posted by Lynsey at 10:31 AM on May 3, 2006

I also thought it said desk. Weird. But it sure sounds like a cat -- maybe a feral-type alley cat?
posted by Mid at 10:46 AM on May 3, 2006

The first image was, quite clearly, a stomach, a spleen, and a colon. In the second image, there is some small intestine visible as well. Seems oddly well-preserved, but where they came from would require a little more info - size, for example, and a gander at the stomach contents to see what the critter ate, which would greatly help narrow down the species in which these particular organs grew.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:39 PM on May 3, 2006

I trip thought it was desk too! Good to know that I'm not the only one who misread it.

That animal looks to be quite big, though - are we sure a cat did this? It's hard to determine the size without seeing something next to it for comparison. Even if it wasn't a cat, I'm with Brandon - I'm now freaked out sufficiently. That cats kill critters is one thing - that they do the creepy meticulous cleaning-up the corpse thing puts them in serial killer territory, no? (I'm kidding...kinda...)
posted by rmm at 2:17 PM on May 3, 2006

Some cats kill bigger animals. The cat I mentioned earlier either got bored with the local mice and voles and other small stuff, or had killed them all, so he graduated to squirrels and rabbits. He was big, butch and fast. When he found he couldn't haul a whole rabbit through the cat-flap, he'd eat half for breakfast (always the head end, for some reason) and bring the hind-quarters indoors from the cold and rain to offer to us.
posted by normy at 2:56 PM on May 3, 2006

Looks like your classic cat "I've eaten the rest, now I'll leave you the nasty-tasting bits" situation to me. You'd be amazed (or perhaps appaled) at the size of things that cats can kill.

I once found the rear half of a huge rat in my kitchen that a neighorhood cat had brought in. The half a rat was as big as the cat in question...
posted by baggers at 2:56 PM on May 3, 2006

Parts clearly labelled.
posted by flabdablet at 4:55 PM on May 3, 2006