What Do I Do With a Dead Animal

Eric : So we’re here today with all city animal trapping. And, one of the questions that we’ve been getting asked often is what do I do with a dead animal?

All City Animal Trapping : Absolutely. And it’s a little bit of a difficult one. I can help people with some of the simpler stuff, but most of the time you’re going to have to call it to get it disposed of. But to clarify a couple of things, the first thing is if you catch a rat in a trap or something like that, or a gopher, you are allowed to throw ruins away in your own trash can. I’m not sure of how comfortable people are with that. Cause they will end up smelling. But you are allowed to with the smaller rodents, dispose of them properly, just like you’re allowed to trap them yourself. So I guess the same rules apply to that. Now crossing over into cats and dogs. Those basically always have to go to the shelter.

Problem being right now is not all of the shelters are operating at full capacity or taking any animals in. But I guess the differentiation becomes with cats and dogs, they consider them domestic wildlife. With raccoons, possums, skunks, they consider a nuisance wildlife.

So your animal shelter will only deal with domestic wildlife for the most part, which is essentially cats and dogs. Which has created the market that we work in for nuisance wildlife. Nuisance wildlife, you can’t throw it in your trash can, you can’t throw it in a dump, pull up to a dumpster somewhere and throw it in the dumpster. You’re going to need to call around, find a company like us that can pick it up and get it disposed of properly. There are places that you can take them that deal with dead animal removal. And our company deals with it all the time.

The weird difference with animal removal is even before COVID, I’ve had some really strange jobs where like I’ve had to remove deer off people’s properties or things like really, really large animals. And the animal shelter wants nothing to do with that. If it can’t fit, I believe in a 35 gallon drum, they will not take it. A lot of times they won’t take skunks cause they smell or anything like that. And they will still charge you for all those things as well. It’s not a free service with animal removal. A lot of the time on stuff like that, especially if you’re giving them something to dispose of, they have costs just like we do of disposing the animal.

Outside of that, there’s not too much you can do besides calling a professional, especially with stuff in your yard. You have to be careful. Careful with coyotes get to a lot of things in the areas that I work with. You don’t want to go up and put your hands on it or anything like that. You want to use gloves and a bag and a mask the same way you would treat anything else. A lot of times when animals die as well, they void their bowels, so you’re going to have to deal with that. All that stuff is,  pretty gross. And one of the bigger reasons that people usually leave it up to companies like ours…You can call around, you can try and find other places, but the reality is rodents, you can put in your own trash can.

Cats and dogs, if they’re yours and they have a chip and things like that, you can at least call the shelter that you got it from and see what they recommend. But everything outside of that, Is basically considered nuisance wildlife. In which case you would have to call a totally different company. Somebody like ours, animal removal services, things like that, which is different than animal removal because that’s city and state run.

Eric : Gotcha. Okay. Well, thank you.

All City Animal Trapping : No problem. Thank you.