My dad used to work with a place that did electroplating and I worked there on Saturdays with him. One of my morning duties was to get the tanks of dielectric back up to temperature for the day. I can't rememer which processing tank it happened to (I would have to do some research to even remember which chemical dielectrics work with which anodes), but I scared a 'possum that had gotten into the building and, in its attempt to escape, it stumbled into the vat of, relatively, mild nitric acid. It got out, right away, but it only made it about thirty feet before it couldn't even crawl, anymore. It wasn't "playing 'possum", either. It left a stinky trail of fur and acid. I picked it up with a shovel and dumped it into a big bucket and filled it half full with water so it wouldn't stink so bad, went back to work and forgot about it, until quitting time. The bucket of water was brown and the 'possum was just a couple of fist-sized lumps left and that's after the water had dilluted the acid about a hundred times. The reaction of the chemical on flesh was remarkable, to me.
