Dead animal under hood of car?

Factual Questions
1

I am writing on behalf of a friend of mine. She started noticing this horrible smell in her car, and could not figure out where it came from. After a few days, she popped the hood and found a dead woodchuck in there. Gross. She had to take it to the mechanic to get it all cleaned out.

This has left her with a few questions: first, the mechanic told her that he thought someone put the woodchuck under her hood as some sort of terrorist act. He went so far as to ask her if she had any enemies who would want to mess with her, which upset her greatly. I will add that she’s 7.5 months pregnant and already freaking out for other reasons, so we’re trying to reassure her that there’s no way anyone could have done this deliberately, considering she locks her car and you have to pop the hood from the inside. Am I correct? Could a woodchuck get into her engine and die without human intervention?

Also, she has to drive home to Massachusetts in this car next weekend, and it reeks of rotting woodchuck. She had it cleaned… will that take care of the smell? Is there anything she can do get rid of that smell in the next week?

Thanks for helping.

2

It would be very easy for a woodchuck or other small animal to cllimb up inside the engine of a car. It probably figured it had found a nice warm place to take a nap, then got a huge surprise when the engine started up. As far as the smell going away, I’m afraid I have no idea.

3

Hard to say without knowing where in the engine compartment the critter ended up. But I think you’re going to end up never knowing – all the places that are accessible to a crawling wounded creature are also accessible to someone who wants to scoot under the car and shove something nasty up into the works.

Still, I’d be somewhat in favor of the “crawled in and died” hypothesis. It’s very likely that a woodchuck who was hit by a car or in some other way sick would look for something that resembled a burrow. It’s even possible that the woodchuck crawled in and started nesting and then found that being curled up on a running engine was incompatible with life.

4

We lost one of our beloved cats this way.

Our cat, yclept “Mouse”, loved warm places to sleep.

The engine block of a car is warm.

The moving parts mauled her to death.

Mom was driving, & she cries when she thinks about it, more than 10 years later.

The woodchuck was either hiding or looking to get warm.

If it was a threat, it would have been placed where she could more easily find it.

The mechanic, IMHO, is a sadistic @#$%. Call his boss, Get him fired for cruelly frightening pregnant women for kicks.

5

A friend of mine heard a weird noise when he started up his car, so he turned the engine off and the noise went away. He started it up again, and the noise came back, so he turned it off and opened the hood. Instead of finding something mechanically amiss, he found his cat cowering in the engine compartment. Fortunately, it only lost half an ear, and otherwise went on to live a normal happy life.

My mother once left her car off at the airport for a week while she went on a trip. When she returned, the car wouldn’t start. She had it towed to a garage, where they discovered that some critter had made a nest in the air cleaner.

Mice made a nest in an old car that I used to own.

Another friend of mine stopped at a gas station, and a mouse ran out from underneath his SUV. It had apparently climbed into the engine compartment while in his garage, and managed to stay inside the engine compartment all the way to the gas station, where it finally made its escape.

I also recall a rather amusing story from a caller on cartalk who had squirrels that hid dog food inside her air conditioning ducts. Every time she turned on the AC, the vents spewed dog food like a popcorn popper.

So yeah, critters get up under hoods all the time. She’s lucky that it didn’t gnaw through anything important.

I would hope that the mechanic was just ignorant, not intentionally sadistic.

As for getting the smell out, the cartalk guys have some sort of special product they use, but I believe they suggest using something like lysol in a pinch. Start the engine, turn the AC up on high so that the fan is blowing full blast, and spray lysol into the air intakes.

Be glad that the critter didn’t crawl into the ductwork and die (fortunately woodchucks are a little large to do this). You’d have to take apart half of the car to get the smell out.

6

Bosda, you’re overreacting (as usual).

a) The mechanic pointed out a real possibility, although one with a low probability.

b) If you can find a mechanic who’s willing to remove a rotting dead animal from your engine, you keep him.

7

Our Camaro was running like shit for a while, and I finally took it into the dealer. He asked me if I had an outside dog. I said, “yeah, why?” and he said that mice will grab the dog food nuggets and stash them in their home, which happened to be the warm engine area. He took a huge handful of dogfood out of the air filter thingy. He says it happens all the time. Little fuckers! I guess if nothing else, they’re resourceful!

8

[ol]
[li]Mechanics deal with this all the time. My Father was a mechanic, who owned his own station. He says if he saw this once, he saw it 100 times.[/li][li]You forget that the person discussed in the OP is a woman. Women are routinely ignored, dismissed, or cheated by car dealers & mechanics alike. So it isn’t a stretch to say that, odds are, he was “havin’ sum fun duh-HUH!”.[/li][li] Hi Opal. Happy Motoring! :slight_smile: [/li][li]Removing a rotting dead animal from an engine normally involves the use of a complex piece of technology called “a hose”. This works by “shooshing water on it”. Therefore, being willing to remove a dead animal from an engine block is neither rare, nor a display of technical competence.[/li][/ol]

As for your remarks regarding my alleged “over-reacting”; I am not concerned.
Being one of Nature’s Noblemen, I do not solicit peasant opinion; neither does it disturb me.

9

This kind of backs up Bosda’s point-- the mechanic charged my friend $140 to get the woodchuck out. He told her to think about what enemies she might have, who much be trying to screw with her, which made her, a single, pregnant woman living alone, quite paranoid. I feel bad for her, she doesn’t need this stress right now. I tend to think he was being a jerk to her.

I will tell her the tip about the Lysol in the air intake ducts. If anyone knows what the CarTawk guys recommend, please let me know so I can tell her.

10

A co-worker of mine works p/t for the AAA during the winter months. According to him:

The 2nd highest cause of cold morning no-starts is cats crushed and stuck in the belts (the 1st being dead batteries). Apparently, strays like to climb up near the engine block to stay warm.

11

The high tech method that Bosda mentioned doesn’t always work, for several reasons. First off the large parts of said dead animal probably won’t dislodge with just a hose, the have to be removed by hand. Secondly, use of a hose exposes the hoser to splash back of dead animal guts. :eek: Thirdly removal of dead animals presents a risk of disease, for example mouse droppings can spread the hanta virus.
Speaking as a guy who has made his living working on cars, removal of dead (Or live) animals is not in the job description, and is above and beyond the call of duty. I would charge the customer accordingly. Depending on where the car is (labor rates vary) and how chopped up said animal was, I think $140 could be a bargin.
I am firmly in agreement with Finagle.

12

As if morning sickness isn’t bad enough on its own! Nothing like having it helped along by eau de woodchuck. Maybe if her car isn’t rehabilitated in time for her trip, she could rent one so it isn’t so unpleasant. Or maybe a sympathetic friend would lend her his/hers… :wink:

I believe the CarTalk guys’ site is searchable: www.cars.com
Just so you know, I listen to them all the time and they’re generally much less than optimistic about stinky cars recovering…

13

Crap. :smack: I meant, www.npr.org. Type “CarTalk” in the search & it will take you to their site. Under “Owning” (as opposed to “Buying” & “Selling”) you can search their answers to people’s queries.

14

Rick, I am relieved to hear that my friend wasn’t ripped off for $140 and that the work the mechanic did wasn’t something one of us could have done for her (ewwww). However, I do think he could have refrained from fanning the flames of paranoia. She will feel better knowing that the woodchuck did not meet with foul play done to get revenge on her by some imagined enemy, but rather was the victim of an unfortunate accident.

15

You can get other weird things happening to your car thanks to animals. I know a family who had a car that they didn’t drive for a while, including winter. When they went to start it up the car wouldn’t start. The reason was that some small critter (a squirrel I believe) had completely packed the air intake with nuts. Or maybe it was the air filter (and it makes a better story), but the intake is a bit more believable for most cars.

16

Yes, it’s common to find live or dead animals under the hood of your car, including raccoons, rabbits, mice, squirrels, rats, cats–and there’s even a report of a marmot (similar to a woodchuck). The animals go there most likely because it’s a dark place they think is safe from predators; possibly also they go because it’s warm. They can do a lot of damage.

Prevention: it’s a constant battle, with no magic, simple solution. First, make sure there’s no accessible food stored in your garage (such as cat food or bird seed). Eliminate shelter (clutter) and close all small openings to your garage. Set Victor mousetraps (for mice) by the wheels to your car. If the car is stored outdoors, eliminate all cover near the car. Mothballs, pee, or other scents DO NOT work.

For lots of good information, go to: www.hitchhikinganimals.blogspot.com

17

I knew a guy that drove an hour or two on major highways with HIS cat under the hood. And this was one of those small Japanese cars were you could barely find a place to squeeze an extra walnut in there. How the cat didnt get burned or mauled is beyond me. I was there and saw it.

18

in addition to the animals mentioned commonly finding there way into cars, birds might also nest some animals find rubber hoses tasty.

19

What is even worse that trying to remove a dead animal, is trying to remove a undead animal from under the hood.
Those zombies can be a bitch to remove.

20

I posted this a couple years ago. Note that the mouse had to crawl behind a dust cover through a gap my little finger couldn’t get into. Some animals can get into some seemingly inaccessible spaces.

I was working at a Fiat dealership and had just finished a pre-delivery inspection on a new car at closing time. The car stayed in my stall overnight, and the next morning the porter got in it to pull it out into the lot. It wouldn’t start (cranked just fine).

I started checking it out. It had fuel, it had spark, but wait - why was the timing belt off a few teeth when it had run perfectly just the night before? I found out when I removed the timing belt cover and discovered a flattened corrugated mouse who had been pulled between the timing belt and one of its sprockets. Poor little thing just wanted a warm place to sleep.