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There are plenty of cases in which you would say a dead plant is still alive. Cut flowers are still alive. Seeds and spores are alive. They aren't living in the way that an animal is before it is dead, though.

If you hooked a bit of you (your arm say) up to the right system there's no reason why it couldn't stay alive after the rest of you had happily decomposed. I don't see what makes animals special in this respect.

Ask Descartes, or Derrida, or Deleuze.. etc. It's a big ol' question. I'm just trying to assert that the idea of an animal being anything other than material once dead isn't a rare or unconsidered one.

Fair enough, I just think that it's problematic to assert that it's anything more than material when it's "alive" in the first place.