MovieChat Forums > World War Z (2013) Discussion > *SPOILER* How could zombies tell who's t...

*SPOILER* How could zombies tell who's terminally ill and who isn't


These zombies were humans last time I checked we couldn't just look at someone and say they're going to die. It would be worth keeping a few zombies after the apocalypse they're better than doctors just chain one to a wall if it lunges at you your healthy.

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Different Zombie movies have different zombies

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It is an illogical premise.

It is too bad because this could have been a good film.

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I tought it was a pretty cool movie.

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The fact is, it is true, hungry and even ravenous predators will avoid diseased meats. So not that implausible

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Except they are not really feeding on them. It doesn't threaten their existence.

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They were not humans anymore, they were zombies. Last time I checked we did not have super-aggressivity and infectious bite either. Dog can smell cancer, why can't you assume those can sense disease ? Would be logical for parasites to be somehow able to skip targets unsuitable to ?reproduction?. And we're talking about terminal illnesses, not just a flu or something.

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Exactly... I thought it was a cool and quite logical premise.

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I agree.

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Right. The zombies did not want to waste their bite. They could smell it or tell by the energy the bodies gave off.

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I always thought they could smell it somehow.

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How are they able to smell it? They aren't breathing are they? And if they were they would be smelling their own rotten stench.

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Yo, I hate to bring this up almost a year later but it doesn't help to use the spoiler warning if you put the spoiler info in the title of the topic.

As someone else said, dogs can smell cancer and they can tell (if they're trained) that a seizure is approaching minutes before it happens, so the zombies (who are walking viruses in this movie) could also tell when people were terminally ill.

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it doesn't help to use the spoiler warning if you put the spoiler info in the title

1. If your stupid enough to keep reading after the word spoiler then thats on you not me, the spoiler was 6 words after the word spoiler plenty of time to stop reading.
2. The movie was released over 1 year before my post so anyone on the message board a year after release should expect spoilers, I just wrote it to be nice every other thread didn't even do that much.

dogs can smell cancer

1. No they can't that's an old wives tale hence you don't see dogs when you go to a hospital.
2. Even if a dog could people couldn't. "Dispite a dog’s brain being one tenth the size of a human’s brain, the part that controls smell is 40 times larger than in humans.  A human has about 5 million scent glands whereas dogs have 125 million to 300 million (depending on breed), meaning their sense of smell is 1,000 to 10,000,000 times better than humans!".

So if a dog with 10 million times the sense of smell as a human couldn't smell all diseases then a human couldn't no matter what virus he/she is infected with.

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Actually some dogs CAN smell cancer. Johns Hopkins uses them sometimes. Your comment re why you don't see them at hospitals makes zero sense. We can test for cancer and would still need to run the tests regardless of the way it was identified. No need for dogs, but that doesn't negate the fact that they can detect it.

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It wasn't a problem for me that you put spoiler information in the title - I was just mentioning that it's not the way spoiler warnings are supposed to work.

I don't look at anything on a board before I've seen a movie because I know that there are people who will put spoilers in the titles no matter what anyone else says about this, so I don't risk it.


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They could tell by the energy the bodies gave off, my opinion. People 'size up' each other all of the time and make assumptions based on how a person looks. Everything is energy.

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best not to think about it, the writers certainly didn't.

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If you spent money to see this film in the theaters.....or, if you waste a few hours of your life watching this film in your home....the zombies know that you are sick/stupid and they will not attack you.


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