Often, perhaps more often than not, the ground is covered with grass, above all with couch-grass, whose tenacious rootlets form an inextricable network below the surface.

To dig in the interstices is possible, but to drag the dead animal through them is another matter: the meshes of the net are too close to give it passage.

Will the grave-digger find himself reduced to impotence by such an impediment, which must be an extremely common one?
That could not be.
Exposed to this or that habitual obstacle in the exercise of his calling, the animal is always equipped accordingly; otherwise his profession would be impracticable.

No end is attained without the necessary means and aptitudes.

Besides that of the excavator, the Necrophorus certainly possesses another art: the art of breaking the cables, the roots, the stolons, the slender rhizomes which check the body's descent into the grave.