Can dead animals contaminate our food?

Thanks to Malcolm Bennett for the answer!

Malcolm - I think this is, like all great questions, simple to ask and maybe not quite so simple to answer. If there is a simple answer, I guess it's probably 'yes, but...' So let's deal with the yes part first. Of course, lots of the food you eat will have been in direct or indirect contact with dead animals, dead invertebrates, dead small mammals and birds, and of course poo, which if it comes from a carnival or an insectivore is a kind of processed dead animal. And the microbes involved in decay are usually not pathogenic. That's to say they don't usually cause disease. And most of the pathogens in the corpse, if they cause the death of the animal for example, will die by the time your vegetables have grown because they, they don't really survive in the soil. Furthermore, these bacteria and their toxins are rarely, in fact, I can't think of any examples actually taken up by the roots of plants. The first really big but is if the animal died of anthrax. So the bacteria that cause anthrax can survive in the soil for tens, maybe hundreds, of years. And when exposed to air, they form spores that readily form aerosols and you breathe them in and they can kill you. In somewhere like the UK, anthrax, which is usually seen in farm animals, has always been pretty rare. So anthrax would still not be taken up by any plants that grew in that soil, but I suppose you could get it, for example, from digging potatoes somewhere which was contaminated maybe a long time ago. So nobody even guessed the place was contaminated. The other 'but' is to do with water contamination. The chemicals released from a rotting body can get into water. And some of these might contain or encourage the growth of bacteria which produce toxins, which wouldn't be very good for you. And at the very least, taint the water's taste. And that in turn leads us onto the law, which is quite big on this. In most of the uk you can bury small pets in your own garden, but it has to be your own garden. It has to be your own land. You can't bury them in a local park and you can't bury them in your neighbour's garden. So if I go back to the beginning, I think my conclusion is still that the answer is 'yes, but...'