TROIS-RIVIÈRES, QUE.—Rotting pig carcasses are best left to maggots and beetles, undisturbed. Unless, like Shari Forbes, your job is to lift a flap of the crusty skin and see how the bugs and decaying parts are doing.The unfortunate result of such handling is a stomach-turning olfactory assault which Forbes, a professor of forensic chemistry, somehow barely notices. Prompted, she describes the stench like a sommelier of the putrid: “It’s a musty, musky smell … like a landfill or roadkill.â€Or a rotting human cadaver, which is Forbes’s specialty.In the spring, she will open Canada’s first “body farm,†an outdoor site in Quebec to research the decomposition of human cadavers. Until then, she’s using pigs as human analogs.Ghoulish and morbid are words that often get thrown Forbes’s way. Some who meet her are even shocked to find that she looks, well, normal.“I hear that all the time: ‘You don’t look like somebody who studies death,’ Forbes, 42, says in an interview at her office at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières, a town halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.“I understand people’s perception that (my work) is creepy,†she adds. “But I’m a professor in forensic science — what were you expecting, Morticia Addams?â€The body farm’s practical goals are to help police determine the time of death of potential victims, whether death was natural or criminal, and to better train dogs to search for cadavers.The high-security site will be in a wooded area in Bécancour, a largely agricultural town across the St. Lawrence River from Trois-Rivières. The bodies — no more than 10 at any one time — will be placed in scenarios to mimic police work.Some will simply decompose on the ground, like a missing hiker who suffered a fatal accident. Others will mirror crime scenes and be covered with twigs, leaves ...
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