Despite residents’ complaints, Texas State University is going ahead with plans for a 17-acre “body farm,” for the study of decomposing corpses, just inside the city limits of San Marcos, Tex., the Austin American-Statesman reported. It quoted the university’s provost as saying the facility — technically, a forensic anthropology research field laboratory — was a “done deal.”

The field lab will help investigators analyze outdoor crime scenes and determine things such as time and manner of death and a victim’s identity. The property will be surrounded by a 10-foot-high fence topped with razor wire, and a 70-foot-wide grass buffer that will absorb rain runoff.

But neighbors still don’t cotton to the idea of dead bodies lying around, some buried and some left in the open. They fear that the site will attract coyotes, flies, and vultures. A professor of forensic anthropology countered that a similar site in Tennessee had operated for 27 years without problems of flies or disease spreading to neighboring properties. As for avian scavengers, bodies left in the open will be protected by vulture-proof cages. —Charles Huckabee