Maybe a haz-mat suit would be wiser.
If you must push it out into the street then I suggest doing it in the dead of night to minimize witnesses. Use a shovel or an old broom you don’t care about any more.
It has begun to rain. The smell is mildly lessened. I decline to push a slippery corpse on a slippery area in the dark. This can only end in tears.
We shall wait and hope.
Yes, i live outside a major NY city upstate, in a large well populated suburb and this is on a busy street.
This sounds prudent. Have you thought of sticking a “Free” sign on it? Do you have an older couch you could throw into the bargain?
:eek: Did you learn nothing from the whale clip?
Where is the Carrion Crew?
By that, I mean nature’s little undertakers… road kill doesn’t last long around here between the crows, the ravens, SBB’s having a taste, the turkey vultures, the coyotes, feral dogs, raccoons… in general, road kill doesn’t last long enough to get that rank. Yet you now have three corpses just lying along the road?
What happened to the scavengers?
Depending where in upstate New York he lives, vultures are uncommon, especially the northeastern part. Crows were getting awful close to extirpation in New York after the West Nile outbreaks about 10-15 years ago, though I have heard they are rebounding. The ground animals may be avoiding the area, especially if it’s busy, but at the same time, it’s at least slow enough that a raccoon crossed there. I would think the reason though is that it’s a crowded suburb with a low animal density and there are enough food sources elsewhere that not everything gets hit. Best guess is that there aren’t a lot of birds hanging about there and the ground animals are busy enjoying trash. That just leaves the insects and they take their sweet time about it.
The other burning question that has yet to be asked is ‘How the heck did a gopher end up in New York?’ The plains pocket gopher is probably the most eastern distributed species and it doesn’t get any further east than maybe Ft. Wayne, Indiana or so. That little gopher in New York must have been a traveler, get that corpse to the Fish and Wildlife Services pronto. They’ll be scratching their head as to how it ended up in Albany.
I’ve heard people around here (western PA) call our groundhogs “gophers”.
Really? I’m in Morgantown, WV and we call them groundhogs. Occasionally someone will say whistlepig, but I’ve only heard gophers called gophers.
Either that, or someone’s pet got loose or was abandoned.
There’s a special circle of hell for people who abandon pets - such animals have no skills to survive in the wild.
Yep, 99.9% call them groundhogs, but I’ve heard one or two people call them gophers. No idea why.
Tangentially, a guy I know was embroiled in a legal battle with the little old lady who was his neighbor. She would buy bags of bird seed, open them, then dump the seed into piles in her yard to feed “the wildlife”.
He got pictures of rats feeding on the seed and approached the code enforcement people. She argued that they were not rats, but rather pocket gophers, which code enforcement, he and I had never even heard of.
When the case was in small claims court (long story) I suggested he use the bible to support his case (the part about not spilling your seed on the ground).
There are a shit ton of gophers here. They are native. You are probably thinking of Badgers.
If you wish to help me encourage local services to remove the beast, please up vote my request. Seriously minimal services makes those choices based on popularity. May the odds be ever in my favor.
Your link doesn’t work. I got a error page. I wholeheartedly support you.
I don’t know what you are calling gophers, but there aren’t any actual gophers in New York State. They are found in the western US and Florida.
How big are these supposed gophers? Actual gophers are the size of a large mouse or small rat.
Ate lunch with a bunch of old EHD guys once. They got to talking about having to dispose of bloated cows. The trick is to use a long, pointed hook. You stand on one side of the cow and reach over to create a breach on the other side of the cow. Do not try to move a taut cow without breaching first.
This is the animal known locally as gopher or groundhog interchangeably.ymmv.
Link fixed