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David tells her, "As for the bear, two bullets to the head. The first -- non-fatal -- was a straight-on shot. Bears' foreheads are sloped, so the bullet ricocheted off the skull, leaving a copper jacket, which peeled away and embedded in the hide." David pulls it out while Catherine takes a look at the dead bear's eyes. She looks up again, bothered. David continues, "The fatal bullet entered in the ear, lodged in the brain. I removed it already." Catherine picks it up and notes, "It's lead -- no copper jacket. So the copper jacket had to have come from the rifle. But this is from a handgun." "So [the hunter] shot one bullet from his rifle and another from his pistol," David shrugs. Catherine points out that Dead Shredded Hunter had neither a pistol nor a knife, so the bear's big gaping stomach wound is a mystery too. David points out that the gallbladder was removed post-mortem, and adds, "I can't tell you why." David is not up to date on the ridiculous atrocities men will commit.
For those of you who are also wondering what the big deal is, a quick and dirty explanation: bear gall bladders manufacture ursodeoxycholic acid (URDA), which has been shown in some tests to treat liver and gallstone problems. Although URDA can be synthesized from cow gall bladders, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine often contend there's no URDA like bear URDA. Since bears are getting scarce, and people are beginning to say, "Wait...you mean there's an alternative for manufacturing this chemical and you're not using because...why?" there's a hot market for wild bear gall bladders. Note I said wild; a concurrent practice that's sprung up to meet demand for URDA is bear farming, in which bears are raised in cages and milked of their bile twice daily. Critics contend this shortens the bears' lives considerably. Bear farmers, naturally, dispute this. The upshot is, we're facing a plotline in which we'll have to admit, once again, that when it comes to the way we treat other species on this planet, we're not covering ourselves in glory.
Poor Warrick is left to sift through Shredded Dead Hunter's personal effects. Unsurprisingly, they are shredded as well. Nicky comes in and tells Warrick he ran the vic's prints, to no avail. Warrick's feeling testy. He asks, "We found this guy 25 miles from civilization. Where did he come from?" Nicky figures that Dead Shredded Fred had company, so it's likely the missing guy drove them both out there. Warrick hands over Dead Shredded Fred's watch and comments that it's pretty high-end. Nicky counters that hunting's not a poor man's sport. And yet it's how a lot of poor people worldwide feed themselves and their families. Funny, that. Nicky then comments, "U.S. presidents still hold up dead ducks for photo ops." Well, if you're talking about that kind of hunting...not to jump the gun here or anything, but there's a distinction between the kind of photo-op hunting politicians do and real hunting.