The Meat Of The Matter

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is — why don’t you test on meat? Quit fooling around with “ballistic gel”, the people ask, because “I’ve never been attacked by a block of Jell-O. There are so many better things you could be testing on, like:
A roast
A ham
A side of beef
A pork shoulder
A pig carcass

At first glance, that sounds perfectly reasonable. After all, humans are made of meat, self-defense bullets are meant to work against humans, so why not shoot meat to get the most realistic assessment of performance?  Lots of other YouTubers do it, why don’t you?

Because, like so many things in this world, what seems superficially like a good idea can in fact turn out to be a lousy idea after a little more exploration and thought.

Skipping to the heart of the matter, here’s the problem: dead tissue (such as a carcass or a roast) responds to bullets very, very differently from living tissue.  Living tissue is wet, saturated with fluids, and very pliable and elastic.  It stretches and retracts.  Heck, just try flexing your muscles or extending your gut out or sucking it back in, and you can see for yourself — living tissue is very flexible.

Dead tissue isn’t.  Think of a ham — try stretching that out, or squeezing it in — it doesn’t work, does it?  It isn’t the same.  And it most definitely doesn’t respond to bullets the same as living tissue does.

Think of it like a sponge.  Soak a sponge in water, and it’s squishy and stretchy and — well, sponge-y.  Crush it in your hand, then let go, and it springs back to its original shape.  But squeeze out all the water and let it dry, and it becomes stiff and brittle, and you could break it in half.  Try crushing it in your hand, and it won’t spring back to shape, it’ll instead break and turn to dust.

That’s akin to the difference between living tissue and dead meat.  There’s a reason they call dead bodies “stiffs”, after all.  Once the living organism dies, gravity takes over and the fluids begin to drain out of the tissues.  Rigor mortis sets in after about 3 hours, and the tissue turns from what you used to be able to flex and stretch, into something very stiff; it’s difficult to move a corpse’s limbs at all while rigor mortis is in effect.  It doesn’t soften up until decomposition kicks in.

The tissue changes after death.  Dead tissue is not the same as live tissue.  It doesn’t respond the same way, it doesn’t have the same pliability, and it doesn’t stretch the same.

Putting a bullet into a roast can result in a tremendous hole left behind — but that’s deceptive.  Because dead tissue doesn’t stretch like living tissue does, the effect of the temporary cavity can be exaggerated when viewed in dead flesh — just like it is when viewed in clay, or soap, or a “bullet test tube” or other testing medium that doesn’t simulate the behavior of living flesh.  What might look like a colossal injury in a roast, may be nothing more than a temporary stretch that results in bruising in a living organism.  A bullet that blows a gigantic hole in a ham, might result in a small icepick wound in a living human.

In short — meat testing is pointless.  It doesn’t tell you anything valid, that you really need to know.  It’s a waste — a waste of food, a waste of time, a waste of bullets.  Cadaver testing CAN be useful, if it’s conducted nearly imminently after the moment of death, before too much changes in the body.  If you were a hunter who had just taken down a deer, for example, and you wanted to then test some handgun bullets in the corpse, that might be practical if you can do it immediately — within, say, five minutes of death.  Maybe 15 minutes at the absolute maximum.  In such a case, the tissue won’t have drained, it won’t have stiffened, and it will still respond like living tissue should.  But after about fifteen minutes, forget it — it’s too far gone.

Ballistic gel was engineered to simulate the response characteristics of LIVING tissue.  It’s wet, hydrated flesh (it’s made from ground-up pork skin).  It stretches and tears and resists penetration the same as living flesh does.  That’s why it was invented, that’s why we use it.

How do bullets tested in ballistic gel look, as compared to bullets taken from actual human bodies from real “street” shooting incidents?  Pretty much identical.  Eugene J. Wolberg, Senior Firearms Criminologist with the San Diego Police Crime Lab, did a study back in 1991 where he compared bullets fired into gel, against bullets that were extracted from autopsies of human shooting victims, and he correlated both the penetration characteristics as well as the appearance of the bullets, and found that there was a high correlation between bullets shot in humans, and those shot in ballistic gelatin.

I very well understand the confusion about, and the reason people gravitate towards, wanting to use meat in testing.  But it just doesn’t work.  It’s not practical, and it doesn’t deliver results that match real shooting scenarios and real autopsies.  Ballistic gel does, and that’s why it’s used for bullet testing.