As most of the old hands know, I'm a cop in the States. I made sergeant last July and left major felony investigations for a street supervisor position. I am basically a front line supervisor to uniformed beat officers. One of the things I do is decide if we're going to force entry into a residence, or if the officer decided to without me if they are justified in doing so. The main reason we force doors without a warrant is because we have probable cause to believe someone is dead or dying inside. Which leads us to this story.
The set up is elderly mother reports her son hasn't contacted her for four days, and that he normally comes to her house to shower and do laundry because his sewer hookup isn't working (code for: didn't pay water bill and water is turned off). The last time she spoke with him he was having an asthma attack and told her he didn't have his medicine. I went out and met two officers there, one brand new rookie and one with a couple years on. The neighbors said he normally sat on his porch and harassed them by shooting their houses with BB guns but hadn't seen him for a few days. The mail had stacked up in the mailbox. Repeated knocking and announcing our presence got no response. That's all hallmarks of a dead guy in the house, so I told the rookie to kick the door in.
He got the door forced, gagged and backed out. No biggie, I figured his first exposure to a severely decayed body and it gets a lot of rookies. The more experienced officer starts to go in, comes out dry heaving, and doesn't get in the house either. Bodies don't phase me, regardless of level of decomp, unless they are children. I can babysit your decayed corpse then go eat lunch with no issue. I've seen uncounted corpses at this point. What I've NOT seen is rabbit shit about a foot deep in the house. The guy was dead, but hadn't started to decay much yet. However there was LITERALLY 8-12" of rabbit shit on the floor. That's what had gagged the younger guys, they hadn't even got to the body yet. There were 30 rabbits in the house and he apparently never cleaned up after them. Every room in the house but two had a floor completely coated in rabbit shit, and those two had piles but hadn't covered the floor yet.
The guy was dead in the hallway with a painter's dust mask on.
I don't get a lot of "firsts" on the job any longer, but that was a first for me.