Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I remember reading (maybe in another context) that there are very few veterinarian pathologists who do canine autopsies, so it may be taking a long time to get that done properly. It seems to me that this is a very challenging case for a human pathologist or toxicologist because of the number of things that they are potentially looking for, the time that elapsed since death, and the likely degradation of the bodies. So that may be slowing down the whole thing as perhaps they needed to call in specialists or send it to a more sophisticated lab for processing.
I think the tainted food folks are waaaay off. There's no way tainted food kills you that quickly. Even botulism....which is about as deadly as it gets with food issues....takes many hours to set in. So maybe they all ate something contaminated with botulism the night before and it hit them all simultaneously on the hike? Seems pretty unlikely. At most, a food born pathogen would likely only accelerate the heat stroke problem -- e.g., if it slowed them down or if they were vomiting, they could become more dehydrated more quickly than they had planned for in a hike. But it would make no sense not to split up and send the more healthly one for an ambulence if that was the case. People don't react on the same timeline or with the same severity to food poisoning.
This isn't true at all. Any university with a vet school can do a necropsy.
I used to prosecute animal cruelty cases and I've personally requested at least a dozen of them. That strikes me as an implausible reason for substantial delay.