I love getting dead animal calls because over the years, I’ve gotten very good at locating them. I go to the house where there are complaints of a dead animal odor and sure enough there is. The customer stated that he and his wife have searched high and low to no avail. They tried living with it for a few days in hopes that the odor would dissipate and it hasn’t. The first thing they ask is if I have a camera and I understand why. Our whole team has infrared cameras with us that we bought in hopes that it would assist us in locating animals (dead or alive) in walls or hard to access areas. The truth is, they don’t work like they do in the movies. The most important tools to use are your eyes and nose. Nose to follow the odor and eyes to see where the animal could’ve gone depending on the location of the entry-point and the structure of the property. This job was fairly simple because most homes in Orange County are built on a slab, so there is no crawl space under the house. So I go into the attic (after being told there was nothing up there) and find a large, dead rat. It wasn’t near the access (never is) and was in a corner above the bedroom where they smell it the most. It wasn’t just lying there either. It was bunched in with blown-in insulation and that’s pretty much camouflage for animals – especially in the dark. So I treated the area where the carcass was found and showed the homeowners the vent on the roof where the rat got in. I offered to seal it up for $30, but he said he would do it. It always brings me joy to find and remove a carcass for a family trying to enjoy their home. I think it’s a little bit of pride too. ‘Til the next one…
