D Shkundia’s scientific contributions

Animal cruelty is a criminal offence under the current legislation of Ukraine. When investigating criminal proceedings related to animal cruelty, including domestic cats, it is often necessary to establish the time of death. Therefore, the development of new methods for determining it and improving existing ones is extremely relevant. The purpose of the study was to establish the relationship between the obtained values of wet spot area indicators and the time of death. To achieve this goal, the authors propose a new method for determining the age of death of domestic cats based on the results of measuring the area of a wet spot obtained from skeletal muscle tissue samples of corpses (Shkundia method). To do this, samples of muscle tissue were taken from the corpses of cats, a wet spot preparation was obtained by pressing and its area was calculated to establish a correlation between the values of this indicator and the time that has passed since death. The study of the obtained indicators established that these values are constant, and the features of fluctuations in the values of this indicator with the time elapsed since the death of the animals were established and shown graphically. Using a number of statistical methods, the absence of dependence of wet spot area indicators on the muscles from which samples were taken for research and animal breeds was determined. The nature of changes in the values of the wet spot area indicator depending on time is established and the features of their fluctuations in different periods during 27 days from the moment of animal death were explained. Reference values of these indicators depending on the time elapsed since the death of animals are presented, which can be used by forensic veterinary experts in practical work to determine the time of the occurrence of death of domestic cats. Due to a number of advantages, this method can be widely implemented in the practice of forensic veterinary medicine

Chiroptera is the only group of mammals that is able to fly. They are beneficial for people and ecosystem they live in. In Ukraine, all species of bats are rare or endangered, in particular serotine bat (Eptesicus serotinus Schreber, 1774). So as to prevent the extinction of currently existing species of bats, it is crucial to combat their diseases, in particular improve diagnostics, including postmortem diagnostics. At the macroscopic and microscopic levels, morphology of bats has still been studied poorly, especially such of bats that live in Ukraine. Besides, knowledge of the structure of various organs of bats at macroscopic and microscopic levels is necessary for effective pathoanatomic diagnostics of their diseases. We researched the normal histological structure of some organs of E. serotinus. For this purpose, we used four corpses of this animal, which had previously died as a result of their disturbance during winter hibernation. We carried out a histological study, for which we sampled organs such as the liver, kidneys, lungs, heart, subcuta-neous gland, and spleen. From the samples, we prepared histological sections and stained them with hematoxylin eosin. We described the general patterns of microscopic structure of the said organs of serotine bat. We found that microscopic structure of all the examined organs was similar to that of mammals in general. At the same time, we did observe some peculiarities of the histo-logical structure of the studied organs, especially lungs, compared with such of other mammals, particularly: poor degree of development of the stroma, compact arrangement of parenchyma elements in the parenchyma-structure organs, large variability of sizes of alveolar lumens in the lungs. We assume that those peculiarities had emerged because of bats' adaptation for flight. We believe that it is promising to continue research of microscopic structure of various organs of E. serotinus, as well as other bats living in Ukraine and around the globe.

Determining the time of an animal’s death is an extremely relevant subject in the practice of modern forensic medicine, because the issue often arises when investigating crimes related to animal abuse, in particular, with domestic cats Felis silvestris catus (Linnaeus, 1758). Methods of identifying time of cats’ death are currently developed insufficiently and their introduction into the veterinary-forensic practice has been limited, including the histological method we have employed. We used five corpses of cats, from which we periodically, after certain time periods, gathered the material for histological study, sampling such organs as the liver, kidneys, lungs, heart (myocardium), and the skeletal muscles. From the collected material, we made histological sections and stained them with hematoxylin and eosin. We determined the general patterns in changes occurring in the internal organs of cats over time, namely changes in the staining intensity of the cell elements and intercellular structures on the histopreparations; formation of detritus-filled cavities; a number of distinctive changes in the connective-tissue stroma of the organs; emergence of baciliform bacteria in the tissues and formation of their colonies. In the muscle tissue, we found specific features such as loss of alignment and emergence of transversal grooves with subsequent fragmentation. The study revealed that the development of those changes in each organ clearly correlated with time that has passed since each animals had died. Thus, a complex evaluation of detected changes can give a more accurate – compared with other existing methods – assessment of the time of death of a corpse submitted to forensic veterinary examination. We recommend using the histological method for animals presumed to have been dead for no more than 18 days, because later the tissue disintegration reaches such a level that complicates the correlation of changes with time. We consider it promising to study the time of death of domestic cats using other methods for identifying criteria for postmortem intervals longer than 18 days, and also identifying time of death in other species of animals.