I am playing A16 right now. They take roughly 2 in-game days to despawn by themselves.
They serve a purpose in that left alone, large piles will attract screamers.
Dog corpses are the same in both alphas, they remain for longer than A18 corpse despawn, but despawn faster than A16 corpses.
A16 did not have tons of gore blocks everywhere, your glue was entirely dependant on corpses.
You clean what you want in A16. So say you have a horde structure not part of your main base, the corpses would despawn by the 7th day if your lazy. You would not be near it enough to trigger the screamer spawn.
I have cleared recently cleared over a hundred corpses with an axe in only 2 in-game hours. That equates to 5 minutes IRL. Axe is not efficient for harvesting, but if you are doing it simply to clear them and not the bones, then yeah. Again, if you want bones in A16, this is pretty much your only resource.
