Originally published at: Pigs can breathe through their butt, and maybe you can too! | Boing Boing
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So the myth from grade school is true: if you hold in a fart it gets absorbed into your bloodstream!!
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I doubt I can breathe out my butt, but I know a lot of people who can talk out their ass
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Join the party
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I guess in the middle ages blowing air up the but was considered a drowning remedy. Maybe they were on to something…
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Now you’re just blowing smoke up my ass!
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Lighting a hyperoxygenated fart would be quite the party piece.
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So butt breath is a good thing in the morning?
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This sounds horrifying. To test this, they’d have to pump oxygen into their backsides, then literally cut off the oxygen supply to their lungs, causing a suffocation reaction in the pig. (If you ever watched the hydro-breathing scene in The Abyss, it would be at least that awful.)
Maybe they used an induced coma, or some powerful sedation, but it seems like a horrible thing to do to any living creature.
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I can only exhale…
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Oh no, you’re not tricking me into trying to breathe through a pig’s butt.
Again.
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Lack of oxygen doesn’t actually cause suffocation reaction. That is caused by high CO2 concentration. So breathing oxygen deficient gas does not cause distress as long as you can expel CO2. This is actually a major health hazard when handling compressed or liquefied gasses as if a nitrogen leak displaces the oxygen you won’t feel a thing until you fall unconscious and die.
I would guess that the pigs were sedated. Ethics standards usually require sedation in this kind of study whenever possible. I also imagine it would make it a lot easier to keep the oxygen pump their butts, and would also lower metabolic rates. Since the a key human use case is probably during extreme trauma surgery I think it would also be reflective of the expected use case in humans.
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Next you’ll be telling us that we can eat through our butts:
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Extra oxygen through the other end? Trey Parker may have been prescient about the future of doping in competitive cycling:
I’m wondering who the first person was to ask “Can pigs breathe through their butts?”
Because that is not an obvious question to me.
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Weirdly enough this is not the first time i’ve heard of this, and its possible application in the medical field
WTF was that research team doing that led them to this discovery?
