The following is my translation of an article called: 'Wo bleiben die Tiere, die eines natürlichem Todes sterben?' von Dr Kurt Floericke. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Wegweiser für Naturfreunde 1923, Heft 8, Seiten 217-218. I'm not aware of any previous translation.
In this instance the German language proves more graphic than the English. Late in the article Dr Floericke discusses the industry of beetles (aka Burying beetles). The German word is Totengräberkäfer, and that could literally translate as 'grave-digging beetles' (or 'undertakers' if you're posher).
Trevor Dykes.

Where are all the animals which die of natural causes?
This question was posed by Wilhelm Hansgen in the February issue of Fahrtgenossen, and the result was that no researcher or friend of natural history attempted to give a satisfactory answer beyond what is contained in some Indian myths, that dead animals disappear in some mysterious manner. That is of course incorrect. What is true is that one relatively rarely finds dead animals, vertebrates at least. The well known elephant hunter, Sanderson, who has spent a life time travelling all over British India, states that he has only ever come across two corpses which died of natural means, and these are said to be the only such elephant corpses ever discovered in India. Then again, as we now know, frozen mammoth bodies are still being found in Siberia, and perhaps that would also be the case for Indian elephants were it not for the impenetrability of jungles.

What must be stated, before anything else, is that the majority of animals find their final resting places in the stomachs of their enemies; the unchanging rule of eat or be eaten runs like an imperative through the natural history of the entire animal kingdom. Furthermore, animals which are ill or dying try to retreat to inaccessible refuges; cave dwellers always find their ends in their subterranean homes. I myself have repeatedly found large animals which met a natural death; most commonly this occurs due to infectious epidemics in the animal kingdom as, for example, has been the case for mountain goats in the Alps or deer and bison in the Bialowig Heath, which perished from foot and mouth disease. In my youth I once went for a walk in the beautiful forests of Fürstenwalde and saw, from a distance, a deer lying on its back kicking with its legs. I hurried forwards -and there was the poor animal and its half-born calf already dead; a very rare case, as births are usually very straightforward for free living animals. I also once came across a dead elk stag in Rehrung; often, namely when the ice is breaking, elk may find the floor gives way beneath them and they fall to their doom. Fishermen once brought in three dead elk in a single day, and they had dragged them all from the water between the pack ice. When I was in the south of Asia Minor, I once found myself in a majestic ruined castle in the remotest parts of the Taurus Mountains and there, in a tower half hidden behind a curtain of plants, was a dead bear which could not have met its end more than a few days previously. This experience will remain unforgettable -the dead bear had still managed to shock me and my two companions as we were crawling along a narrow, broken wall on all fours, only suddenly to catch sight of this animal.

Such finds as this are rare, and the main reason for this is that nature has its undertakers. The whole army of feathered and four-legged carrion eaters are among them. In warm lands there are vultures all over which circle at proud heights with their keen eyes on the look out for large corpses, and then they will gather in quantity within an unbelievably short time and, within a few hours, they can be finished with, for example, the body of a camel even before any person would have been able to reach the spot. Marabous and ravens provide them with company and assistance and, during the night, the burial duties are taken over by itinerant hyenas and jackls. "Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather," it says in the Bible. In our region it is the ravens and foxes which attend to dead bodies. Should an evening hunter not to be able to find a shot animal because, for example, of the darkness, then a search the next morning will probably be fruitless as a fox will already have claimed the prize. The most common bodies found on our land belong to shrews, and this is because of the awful musk ox smell, while foxes, dogs, cats, weasels and so on will bite them dead, they will not so often eat them; only the less nasally sensitive owls do that.

For smaller bodies, such as mice and song birds, the duties are generally performed by black beetles, which we distinguish by two orange-red markings on their backs, and this is why they are called Totengräber (note: 'grave diggers' but know as beetles in English). Other consumers of cadavers include the blowflies and their like, the hungry larvae of which can dispose of the rotting flesh of a corpse in a similarly short time. As a result of this tough competition,

Sexton