Go Retire Psychiatrist

This is not about the TV series. This is just a short note on finding out the right agency to contact if you find a dead animal either in the street or at the side of the road. It’s nothing spectacular, but it was a new one on me.

I took my usual walk down the usual street day before yesterday and found a dead deer next to the sidewalk (really a walking trail). It just happens to be adjacent to the Home Owners Association (HOA) in which we live.

You guessed it, it’s the same one in which I called the city about 10 days ago to report the need for vegetation trimming because it was crowding the sidewalk. See my blog post about it.

I checked around the immediate area and found blood smears on the adjacent street. Probably, somebody in a vehicle collided with the deer and then moved it out of the street.

I didn’t see it there the morning before so the accident must have happened overnight. I took a few snapshots.

After I got home, I checked on the web and found phone numbers for the animal shelter and the police. The animal shelter web site didn’t look like the right place to report a dead deer next to a sidewalk. So, I called the non-emergency phone number for the police and reported the incident. She treated it like it was normal business.

I checked today on my usual walk and the deer carcass had been removed. I’m not sure if there’s a way to prevent accidents in that area. Across the boulevard there’s a park and the HOA outlot is on the other side. There’s always some kind of wildlife in them and they don’t read signs.

It occurs to me that there’s a hierarchy in these scenarios. I ran across a dead frog on that sidewalk a few days ago. It looked like it had a close encounter of the messy kind with a big mower. It was gone the following day. Nature has its own cleaning crew for the little critters. Things like hunger and circle of life stuff have a lot to do with that. It can take a long time for nature’s cleaning crew to make a deer carcass disappear.