Global Courant
A 50-year-old man in a small town in central India died earlier this week after choking on a half-cooked eye of a goat.
Police said Mr Bagar Singh was having a picnic with his friends in a village in Chhattisgarh state, some 1,000 km east of New Delhi, when he died, The Times of India reported.
The newspaper said investigations showed that he and his friends first went to a temple where goats are sacrificed in exchange for wish fulfillment. There they bought a goat’s head.
They then went to a village on the outskirts of Surajpur district, where they reportedly had a picnic.
Mr. Singh had already had too much to drink when he picked up the goat’s eye before it was fully cooked.
He swallowed the eye – which was about two inches in diameter – and choked on it.
His friends took him to a hospital 7 km away, where doctors pronounced him dead on arrival.
“The half-boiled eyeball, about two inches in diameter, got stuck in the breathing tube and choked the respiratory system. It may well be the main reason for death,” Dr Swapnil Gupta told The Times of India.
“In addition, the man was drunk, which leads to respiratory depression,” he added. “During respiratory depression, if the food is not chewed properly, food is very likely to pass into the respiratory pipe.”
Dr. Shailendra Gupta, an associate professor at Ambikapur Government Medical College, said a goat’s eye has the consistency of jelly and can easily stick to the muscles of the breathing pipe.
