The word “carrion” has long been employed in literature both in its literal sense—as decaying flesh that sustains scavengers—and as a potent metaphor for moral decline, corruption, or the debased aspects of human nature. In works from Robert Burns’s reference to the “carrion crow” [1] and Ben Jonson’s emphatic utterance “GORCROW, carrion crow” [2], the term vividly evokes the imagery of decay and death. Shakespeare uses it ironically in comparison, as in his comparison of courtship lives to “carrion flies” [3] and later as a degrading insult towards a character [4], while writers like Nietzsche and Thoreau extend the analogy to comment on the state of wisdom and civilization [5, 6]. Even scientific and exploratory texts, such as those by Darwin [7, 8] and the narrations of Lewis and Clark [9], adopt the term to describe natural processes, showing that “carrion” serves as a bridge between the physical decay of nature and the metaphorical decay in human society.