I concede that the question When does a naturally decaying dead animal cease to exist (as an animal)? cannot be given a precise answer. Exactly how many percent of a corpse must remain intact in order for it to be still in existence (as a dead animal)? – I don't know (but I'd say confidently that a mere skeleton is no longer an animal).Steve3007 wrote: ↑February 18th, 2018, 6:56 pmCorpsism. I like that. I like the craziness of it. I wonder what criteria the corpsist uses to determine whether the animal has disintegrated. As with so much else in life, rotting away is not an all-or-nothing affair. It's a process without any hard dividing line between corpse and no-corpse. Unless we're cremated, of course."Corpsism is the thesis that an animal is an enduring thing that survives death as a corpse, until the corpse disintegrates."
However, questions concerning the beginning or end of existence of an individual object or person are generally fraught with problems of vagueness. For example, even if you're a substance dualist believing that we are body-soul compounds, the question arises as to when exactly our souls are connected to and unified with our bodies during the development of the latter in our mother's womb.