Answered by someone else, but yeah… because of other animals digging the corpse up. I understood it to be three-feet depth minimum to bury a family pet, and I’ve seen recommendations to go deeper for larger dogs. Also, it is not legal to have home pet burials in some jurisdictions.
Poor kitty. There’s also one on the road that I take to go into the city, I keep passing by and feeling bad. At least it doesn’t look like this one suffered…
I don’t think it has to be in the street to qualify for dead animal pickup. Our local Animal Control came and picked up a dead cat in our back yard. I have no clue why it picked our yard to curl up and die in. Maybe it was quiet.
Years ago, we lived in a house ago we lived in a house that had a terrible mole problem in the front yard. My husband tried everything to get rid of that mole to no avail. He always claimed that if he ever caught that mole he would crucify it to the tree* in our front yard as a warning to every other mole in the neighborhood to stay out of our yard.
Perhaps, that might be a way to keep future dead cats out of your yard.
Apparently you can compost them as well. You can compost almost anything organic if you cover it deeply in straw or leaf litter or another plant material, and leave it long enough, according to The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins.