Rav Yehuda says in the name of Shmuel that if a person gets their neck broken and most of the basar severed, they are metamey b'ohel. By stating this the gemara seems to equate a person's death with the sugya dealing with an animal's death. For an animal we said that melika if done like this would ruin the melika because the bird would be dead before the simanim were cut. Therefore it must be that we say (at the top of the amud) that melika is always done without cutting through the basar. Getting back to a human, when asked about Eli and how could he be considered dead when his basar was not severed, the gemara answers and older person is different. If so, my question is why is an old bird allowed to have melika, it should be considered dead before the simanim are severed even without the majority of the basar being severed. Yet the tosefta 1:9 says Turim afilu hen zekainim...
melika on an old bird should be pasul
Menachem Weiman, St. Louis, USA
1) It seems that the key lies in what the verse states that Eli was also heavy. The thing that killed him was his fall from the chair. Because this happened to an older, heavy man, it was fatal. This is the difference between a person and the Melikah of a bird. Even if the bird is also heavy, it has no bearing on the effect of the Melikah; when Melikah is performed there is no fall involved with the bird.
To summarize, there were three things that caused Eli's death: (1) the fall, (2) Eli's advanced age; (3) Eli's weight, which led to a heavy fall. In contrast, concerning Melikah, even if the bird was heavy and old, there was no powerful fall which would cause death even if the majority of Basar was not severed.
2) I looked up the Mefarshim on Sefer Shmuel and I see that the Ralbag writes that the weight of Eli ha'Kohen was the reason for his death from the fall.
3) The Malbim writes that there were three reasons for why Eli died immediately: (1) age, (2) body weight, (3) Eli had lost all of his strength through the backbreaking task of judging Yisrael for forty years. (The Malbim learns that the end of the verse, "and he judged Yisrael for forty years," is actually a description of one of the causes of his death.)
4) Clearly, some of the above factors are not applicable to birds, which can help us understand why one may perform Melikah on an old bird.
Kol Tuv,
Dovid Bloom
Looking again at what I wrote in my first answer, I see that it is does not appear to be consistent with what is written here by the Ma'adanei Yom Tov (by the author of the Tosfos Yom Tov) on the words of the Rosh (#100).
1) The Ma'adanei Yom Tov writes that even though it would appear from the verses that it was his old age together with his weight that caused the fatality and not old age alone -- and therefore this would make a difference for an old man who is not heavy -- nevertheless it is logical that the reason why the verse mentioned Eli's weight is not because of the actual death. The Ma'adanei Yom Tov explains that the crucial factor played by the weight was that made it impossible for him to avoid this sudden fall.
2) According to this, I have to modify slightly what I wrote above. It was not the weight of Eli that caused his death once he fell, but it was his weight that caused him to fall in the first place. This is, of course, inapplicable to birds, where there was no fall that caused an injury.
3) I found that the Maharshal in Yam Shel Shlomo here (#44) also makes a distinction between animals and humans. He writes, "For an animal there is no difference between young and old." The Maharshal does not explain where he gets this from, but at least it does answer the question from Melikah of birds.
Possibly his source may be similar to that of the Ma'adanei Yom Tov. It was the vulnerability of Eli to a fall that led to his death, but this vulnerability to fall would be unusual in animals and birds.
Dovid Bloom