Dead Catfish Under a House

05.12.2005 - 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 first time I've found a dead fish under a house. I began to think about the most unlikely question to enter anyone's mind upon finding a dead catfish under a house - how did it get there? Yes, believe it or not, this is what I started to wonder. I figured that a catfish was swimming in the nearby lake, and an osprey swooped down and caught the catfish in its talons, and then dropped it on land, and then a raccoon found it and brought it under the house to eat it, and then did eat it, but then later another catfish tried to evolve and started to walk out of the lake to become a land-dwelling animal, and it made it as far as under this house, and then realized that it didn't have lungs, and it died, and that's where I found it. Too bad that evolution failed in this case, but I give kudos to the catfish for trying. I took the above photo and bagged the carcass and told the homeowner about my theory, but it was rejected. Still I got my money, which is the most important thing to me, the most important thing in the whole wide world.

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