How do you tell a hippo from a dog? It’s pretty obvious one would think. But after residents of Scott’s Farm reported a decomposing baby hippo in their area earlier this week, identifying the decomposed body proved to be a mission to the untrained eye.
How do you tell a hippo from a dog? It’s pretty obvious one would think. But after residents of Scott’s Farm reported a decomposing baby hippo in their area earlier this week, identifying the decomposed body proved to be a mission to the untrained eye.
Prof Martin Villet, Professor of Forensic Entomology at Rhodes University, said the first thing to look at would be the size of the body.
“If you have the skull, it’s easy, the teeth are the first thing you look at. If you don’t have the head, you look at the feet,” he said. Though the probability of a hippo appearing in Grahamstown is slim, Villet warned that it’s not entirely impossible. “Huberta, the hippo, made her way all the way from KwaZulu-Natal and was shot outside King William’s Town (in 1928),” he said.
Late last year there had been rumours of hippos sited in the Jameson Dam area on the Highland roads.
“However, the Scott’s Farm specimen appears to be a medium-sized dog, possibly a bull terrier. It seems to be lying in the water and has lost its skin,” Villet said. This phenomenon is commonly known as skin slippage, in which the skin of carcasses and corpses of a certain age will peel off like a glove if one would try to handle them.
Another reliable forensic technique used to identify decomposed animal bodies is by their hair. “Hair grows differently. What we usually do is place it in wax. Depending on the motif left in the wax, we can tell which animal we’re dealing with.”
He added that DNA sequencing remains the most accurate method of identification.
