Spare Notes

Dead Animals

One thing they don’t prepare you for when you are an adult is dealing with dead animals.

I’m reminded of this fact for the 3rd time this month, as another bird has flown into the glass pool fence and ended its life prematurely.

Before I get onto how I dispose of those pesky birds, let’s discuss other dead animals.

My daughter’s cat got hit by a car and died. Hearing her upset and asking why did no one stopped broke my heart.

I went around to her place and buried it, luckily it was in one piece. RIP Pedro.

Then there was the rats. I got some large heavy duty rat traps after I saw one wandering around outside a few years ago, plus we had one that was coming in and had a fascination of eating the waste water pipe out of the dishwasher.

These traps work well, sometimes too well.

I’ve caught a giant hedgehog once, it had just got its mouth, I guess it suffocated. One day I got 2 birds instead of the intended rats.

Another time the rat wasn’t dead and it was moving around outside with the trap on its head. Not a fun experience. Lots of what the fuck are we going to do now conversations were had, coupled with we couldn’t leave it like that and also couldn’t let it go.

We came up with a plan, not sure if it was the best but it worked for us. We picked the trap and rat up in one go and dumped it in a bucket of water. Problem solved.

We stopped using these rat traps due to them catching everything else. There is a version with a long tunnel over the top. This will stop things apart from rats and mice, haven’t got any of those yet.

In the meantime I thought a CO2 powered bluetooth rat trap that can kill 24 rats by itself was a good idea. It’s gone off a couple of times, but I’m unsure if it’s killed anything, apparently rats will take a dead one away to eat it or something like that.

Disposing of all these dead animals (except the cat) made us question how best to do it. Burying them is a pain in the ass. We basically wanted to put them in a bag and chuck them in the rubbish.

But what happens if it’s not rubbish day?

I don’t want the dead animal sitting around in a bin stinking everything up (learned that from the hedgehog).

Thought about freezing them until we could chuck them out. Don’t like the idea of them being in the freezer no matter how many bags they are sealed in.

Next step in our morbid journey with dead animals was figuring out where to get rid of them as fast as possible.

If you said the library you’d be right.

Well… outside of the library to be more exact.

We figured out there are 2 public rubbish bins outside of the library which is a 3 min drive from our house.

2026-04-06-10

Here’s what makes it a great bin location:

So when I say I’ve got to go to the library it’s not to return a book.

I’m now off to get that 3rd bird of the month into a bag, then off to visit the library and hope I don’t need to go back anytime soon.