Dead Animal Removal Blog - Trapper's Journal

I am the best. The best there ever was or ever will be. At removing dead animals from homes. That's it though, I'm not the best at anything else. This here job wurn't too tough, but it were tough enough that neither the homeowner or the first company they called couldn't git er done. I got her done in one minute, forty two seconds. The house smelled horrible. I stepped inside and I knew it was a dead opossum. Dead possums smell different from dead rats, cats, bats, or shower mats. My nose led me right to the air vents - a rare source for the odor, but I could tell. I could ...click for more

Thanks to your website, I was given some good info that allowed me to locate a rotting dead mouse in my attic. I was thrilled not to have to pay someone a bunch of money to do it!I had to cut a hole in my hallway to gain access to the space above the room where I had previously whiffed out the location of the carcass, just as you described on your website. Making my way around the walls of the room we knew the smell was coming from, I finally started on the ceiling and before long, GAG!!, I found the source, and it was just like you said...leeching through the sheetro ...click for more

This is a fairly common job: the dead rat in the attic. Rats are probably the most common animal to invade human dwellings (aside from humans, that is), and they have short life spans and often live in high numbers and are persecuted with poisons and so on and so forth, and so they die inside buildings quite often. Since they tend to live in attics, they also tend to die in attics. Thus, the most common dead animal removal job I have is the dead rat in the attic. I don't always know if it's a dead rat when I'm called to the scene, but once inside the building, I can definite...click for more

I smelled a bad smell in this apartment, and I knew it had to be some dead varmint. I walked the house, employing a sniff. I entered the laundry room and got a whiff. I sniffed the walls, I sniffed the ceiling, but it was the floorboard I found most appealing. I leaned on down and felt like a hero, because I knew I'd found ground zero. I got my saw and cut out a square, and was promptly greeted with fragrant air. I reached inside and fished around, and a squishy squirrel is what I found. I bagged it and tagged it and named it Muriel, I said a prayer & made a proper burial ...click for more

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house.  A creature was stirring, a rat squirrel or mouse.  The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, but unfortunately of people the apartment was bare.  The squirrels were all nestled all safe in their beds, while visions of peanuts danced in their heads. Alas one poor squirrel did not make a peep, because it was stuck in a permanent sleep.  Thus from the walls arose such an odor, that Ben jumped in his truck and turned on the motor.  The stench in the house from the walls that arose, gave the luster of ...click for more

"I have a dead rat in my ceiling", the call began. The calls usually do not begin correctly. "Okay, I will come to your house and remove the dead rat" I said. I don't bother to tell the caller that he is possibly wrong. A bad smell in the home can mean a number of possibilities - 99% of the time it is in fact a dead animal. However, which animal might it be? Oh, this is where the delightful sleuthing and treasure hunt begins. In this case, I entered the attic, and smelled it right away. Thus, I knew that it probably wasn't a rat. Rats tend to die under the insulation, and the smell per ...click for more

I liked this job. I was called to this house due to the horrible odor. Sometimes the dead animal odor is faint, and this one aint. What's the past-tense of aint? Waint? Anyhow, as usual, I sniffed and I snuffed, searching for the dead animal. I had no attic space to investigate, so I had to keep my nose on the walls. The smell was strongest in the kitchen. It's usually pretty hard to pinpoint dead animals inside walls. But I'm really good at it. I found the wall with the strongest odor, and as luck would have it, I could make my incision from inside the kitchen closet, thereby making...click for more

First of all, I know that opossum is spelled with one "p", but a lot of internet searchers don't know this, so I decided to spell it with two p's, as in oppossum, or even opposum, which is also another common misspelling. Regardless, on this day, I removed three dead baby opossums from inside a wall. As usual, I entered a home that had a bad odor. I took a cursory stroll around the home in order to gain a sense of the area of strongest odor. I isolated it to a room or two, then jumped in the attic to look. Most commonly, the dead animal is somewhere in the attic. I ent ...click for more

This was an interesting job. I perform dead animal removals on a nearly daily basis. The jobs are always the same - someone calls me with a horrible odor inside the home or building, and suspects that it's a dead animal carcass, and they call me out to address the problem. Most of the time it is a dead animal. However, every now and then the odor is from a different source. Sometimes it's rotting meat - such as the bag of rotting hamburger meat I once found on top of a fridge, the rotting chicken I found behind a stereo, or the rotting and forgotten steak inside a micro...click for more

I was driving along, singing a song, when suddenly I had to stop driving. For I noticed a scent, and I was hell bent on doing some dead animal diving. By dead animal diving, I don't mean leaping headlong into a carcass - I mean investigating and photographing the scene of the crime. I got out of the car and found this wild pig carcass. I suppose, thinking about it now, that this isn't all that interesting. However, it's the only evidence I have as of now of a wild hog. Sure, I've seen the destruction they cause. They absolutely decimate a lawn when they root through ...click for more

It was a dark and stormy night, except for the sunshine and gentle breeze. I fixed my steely eyes on the mysterious and foreboding abode that lay before me, knowing what I had to do, but not quite ready to do it. Then I put on my blue suit and mask and head lamp, and I was in fact quite ready. I found the secret portal to the labyrinth below the forbidden fortress, and said the secret password: "Open". The password didn't work, so I used my hands instead of my larynx and removed the crawlspace door. I took a deep breath and started to crawl inside. But I had to let ...click for more

Some dead animal removal jobs are very challenging - they involve persnickety housewives who recoil at the smell of day-old milk, and can somehow sense a dead flea in the wall on the other end of the house. I arrive, can't smell anything above the scent of 50 sticks of incense and 30 lavender candles, but persist on until I find the littlest critter tucked away in some impossible to find god-forsaken back corner of the house, barely raising the slightest perceptible odor. Those are the lousy dead animal removal jobs. This one, this one was a pure pleasure. It was easy to ...click for more

I got a call about a smell in a wall in a hall at the mall. A rat did crawl, and then it did fall, and it curled in a ball, and it did not stall, if I recall, to offend all. With its smell, which smelled bad. I sniffed it out, then cut it out, then took it out, then looked about, and the people at the mall wondered what mistakes I had made in my life to be the guy who cuts dead rats out of the wall in the hall of the mall. But darn it all, I like my work, and if you don't like it, you're a jerk. I'm writing this way because I'm tired and my brain is nearly expired. When I can't write things of substance, I ten...click for more

What have we here? A regular old smelly dead rat in the attic. Typical case, the homeowner called me with a terrible odor in the house, and asked me to come out right away and find the source of this ungodly stench that no well educated middle/upper class American citizen should have to endure. "Why has this horrible fate befallen me?" the lady of the house moaned and groaned. "My delicate nose shant tolerate such an injustice of nature. It is my right to live in a fresh scented abode." Apparently it was also her right to spread rat poison in the ...click for more

A dead squirrel in a ceiling is no big deal, really. It happens all the time. Squirrels live in ceilings, homeowners are too lazy or cheap or ignorant to have them removed when the squirrel is alive, but then eventually it dies and creates a horrible smell inside the home, and then the people therein decide to do something. To be fair, some people don't know that they have squirrels up in the ceiling, but these same people must also be deaf. Anyway, they do have a sense of smell - they are not asnomiacs - and then I get called to do the dirty work at my low, low pri...click for more

I know some folks consider it morbid, the way I photograph and write about dead animal carcass removal. But it's something that I do, and I do it very well, and when people need my services, they NEED my services. I was very proud of this dead animal removal, and I don't become proud over much. I'm not all that proud of my college degree or my boxing or swimming trophies or any of that, but man, this dead animal removal kicked ass. First of all, the homeowner had already called out THREE different companies before me. All the big names around here...click for more

I arrived at a school in order to investigate a bad smell in one of the classrooms. The school had abandoned use of the room for a couple of days due to the odor, and finally decided to call me out to find and remove the source of the smell. Most dead animal jobs take me either five minutes or two hours. That is, the animal is either dead in some obvious and easy to access location, or it has died in some impossible to find and impossible to reach area. This was a five-minute job. I opened the drop ceiling panels, and voila, I found a dead rat stuck to a glue bo...click for more

I got this dead squirrel out of the attic. It was a girl, and it died out of attack. Someone or something had attacked it with poison. It sniffed it and ate it and that was the roison. Reason a female squirrel died - due to the anticoagulant in the rat poison. Squirrels rarely eat rat poison, so I was surprised. They usually don't eat anything up in the attic, and will normally only eat outside. However, this one managed to eat some poison, at least my autopsy (brief glance and nonchalant assumption) results say that it did. I guess that it could have died of natural causes as well. ...click for more

I got a standard call for a bad smell in a house. When I arrived, I knew that I was dealing with a dead animal, but the smell was slightly different than the usual rats, opossums, squirrels, and such that I deal with. Still, odors do vary depending on several factors, such as state of decay, temperature, ambient odors, and so on. I searched and searched, and could not find the source. I went under the home as usual, and finally I found the dead animal. It was not, as I usually find under a house, an opossum or cat. Well, actually it was a cat - a cat fish. This is the fir...click for more

How now, brown cow? Dead, that's how. I received several phone calls about a dead bear just off Rt. 417 near the Conway exit. One person said that it was a 12-foot dead bear. These calls piqued my curiosity, so I resolved to see the giant dead bear. During my normal day of nuisance wildlife control work, as I traveled along Rt. 417, I remembered to stop and take a look. I saw several cars pulled off to the side of the road on the northbound side (where the dead bear was), and traffic slowing on the other side of 417 as well. I became very excited with a rapid heartbeat...click for more

I found these dead pigeons in the ductwork of a public building. They had an open mushroom vent on the roof, and a large colony of pigeons was entering the ducts and living there. They made a huge mess in the ducts, complete with nests, eggs, a ton of droppings, and quite a few dead birds. Pigeons are often filthy animals, and they simply do not keep clean quarters. They don't live long in cities, and like any other wild animal, carry some risk of disease. They are known, in particular, to be susceptible to salmonellosis, tuberculosis, and ornithosis, but we know ...click for more

This job was extra super duper hard and difficult and aggravating. In fact, dead animals under trailer homes make me angry. This job is always a bitch. In fact, it's pointless to say dead "animal" under a trailer home, because it's always "dead opossum under trailer home". The animal is always a danged opossum. I don't know why I'm complaining. It's not like I care about what the specie is. I guess maybe a little variety would be nice. But if the job lacks variety of animal, it doesn't lack variety in architecture, and this particular trailer home featured a very annoying ...click for more

I was called out regarding a bad smell under this house - a dental lab, to be exact, where they make dentures and such. I arrived and asked the usual questions, such as, "When did you first detect the odor?", and "What part of the house smells worst?", and "Do you think you can give me a good deal on porcelean crowns?". The lab tech motioned to the southeast part of the house, and said that he thought it was a dead opossum. He seemed distracted and intent on clearing up his supplies. I started to get ready, with my Tyvek suit and gloves and HEPA mask a...click for more

I was very proud of this dead animal removal. The homeowners had called out a different company first, but they could not find it. They actually called two other companies, but the one guy was too fat to even get under the house, where the animal clearly was. Granted, the access hole was very small. I squirmed my way through the hole and started to crawl around. I had very little room because of the very large ductwork lining the area. I basically had to navigate my way through a maze of pipes and ducts, with no light, a bad smell, giant deadly spiders that w...click for more

This is a very typical dead animal removal scenario here in Florida. Because of the high water table, the houses here do not have basements. Many homes have foundations flush against the ground, but many are elevated off the ground, with a crawlspace underneath. These areas are magnets for wild animals - they provide a safe refuge from the elements and a good place to set up a den. Opossums in particular like to live underneath houses. Opossums don't live very long - about 2-3 years in the wild. They're very common around here, and they simply d ...click for more

The problem with dead mice in the attic is that they are hard to find. This is because they love to burrow, and they dig their way down into the insulation. So when they die, they're already buried down in some tunnel. This is often right against the drywall ceiling, so the smell seeps down into the house and creates a strong odor within. However, when I go into the attic to search for the dead mouse, I barely smell anything, because the odor is blocked by the insulation, and the strong air flow in the attic, due to the ventilation, prevents much of the smell from building up...click for more

I get a lot of phone calls for the removal of dead animals inside houses. Such an even causes a very strong odor inside the house. Sometimes the smell is so bad that the inhabitants cannot bear to live in the house any longer. If the person in the house realizes that the source of the stench is from a dead animal that is decaying, they can call me, and I'll come and remove the rotting critter. The animal could have died in a variety of places - under the house, in the wall, or so on, but oftentimes the dead body is up in the attic. If I determine, based on my analysis of the house arc...click for more

I've encountered this scenario multiple times. There's a dead animal smell somewhere inside the house. I begin my search, sniffing the area. It's evident that the smell is the strongest in the kitchen. The homeowner knows this, and I can tell as well. However, what the homeowner doesn't suspect is that the dead animal is in fact in the oven. Not broiling in a pan for a Sunday dinner, but rotting in the rear panel with the electrical wiring. The first time I was called for such a job, I was confused as well. I searched the attic, I sniffed all of the cabinets and cupboards, the walls...click for more

This is a very simple dead animal removal. In fact, one might think that this is a very common sort of dead animal removal job. However, this was actually pretty rare. It's not very often that I arrive at a house with a dead animal that is simply lying outside. Most of the time I'm called because a homeowner smells a terrible stench somewhere inside the house, and it's my job to find and remove it. Removing the animal is always the easy part - the finding is usually the tricky part. I suppose that most of the time, if an animal is simply lying dead outside that the hom...click for more

This house was the worst-smelling house that I've ever been in. The odor was unbelievably wretched, both in stench and power. The house was completely unlivable. I knew, as did the owner, that a dead animal lay somewhere in the house, rotting. The smell had afflicted the house for ten days. I put on my HEPA filter mask and searched all around. I searched the attic extensively, but I couldn't find the source of the odor. Amazingly, I did find some living baby raccoons. I suspected that the mother raccoon must have died somewhere, but I could not find it. I ev...click for more