If it’s playing dead, it has a lot of maggot friends in on the joke. I don’t know how long it’s been there - I normally use the garage to go in and out of the house, and haven’t used the front door since Friday.
Tomorrow is trash day. I guess I’ll grab a shovel in the morning and scoop it into a trash bag.
It’s sad. I like having nature around. I have no idea how it died. I don’t have any pets, and the neighbors’ dogs are either indoors or on leashes (that I know of). There are squirrels and iguanas in the area, plus ducks and turtles. Maybe it got into a fight with a dog somewhere nearby, and made it as far as my house before passing out?
Nature is wonderful and all, but I’d rather find a dead opossum in my yard than a sick or injured one. Those li’l buggers can be whirling balls o’ razors when they’re in good health.
Also, I’ll look in the morning and see if there are any signs of a fight. The top side doesn’t show anything, so maybe it died of natural causes. Or maybe someone sprayed chemicals on their lawn and it ended up ingesting some. (It…the opossum.) (some…chemicals.)
I occasionally would see an opossum late at night, making the rounds near the lake. It walked by the house once after a cookout, but just kind of ignored us.
I think I like my squirrels more.
Woke up this morning
Dead ‘possum on my walk!
Yeah, I woke up this morning
Ol’ dead 'possum on my walk!
My younuns found him first
Outlined him with sidewalk chalk!
I look forward to the release of that song—are you preselling?
And live opossums are one of the scariest wild animals that you will ever see in your yard, etc. when they’re all fat and sassy. <shudder> I’ve seen them back down large dogs.
Of course all animals are lovely.
(Seriously, they are! You know—OVER THERE)
Being a mortal being, its time was up at some point or another. If it was a reeeeeally big 'un it could simply have died of old age. Looking at the date stamp this is probably too late to be useful, but … you’re gonna want to double-bag that sucker.
It was on private property - in my city, Animal Control only takes care of things on public property. So I bagged it up this morning, and put it out for the trash. It was gone when I got back.
I hosed the walkway down. And, thankfully, it rained - poured, really - today. Got rid of most of the smell (UGH! I almost thought I was going to throw up dealing with it this morning), and most of the blood stain. I probably don’t need to open a “How do I get blood stains off my sidewalk?” thread.
I didn’t flip the poor thing over to see if it was in a fight. There was a decent amount of blood on the ground, but it didn’t look like a trail leading to where it died. Maybe it got into some rat poison?
Based on rather extensive experience with possums that present for life threatening problems, the most likely are:
[ul]
[li]struck by vehicle (and walked some distance before succumbing)[/li][li]attacked by an animal, usually a domestic dog (and also probably capable of walking some distance before final collapse)[/li][li]normal end of life (possums are very short lived, and few in the wild exceed 3 birthdays)[/li][/ul]
The Virginia Opossum (its formal name) is the only North American marsupial, and it has more teeth than any other North American terrestrial mammal. It does indeed put on a rather horrid drooling, snarling, defensive display if cornered. But it commonly doesn’t actually bite. At least not when carefully manipulated. I’ve reached behind / under many wild, snarling possums “trapped” in someone’s utility room or equivalent and picked them up by the tail. A slow, steady approach usually works just fine. But I caution that it isn’t a certain bet and I do not recommend the technique for general public use .
Many years ago, my wife woke me up to say there’s a dead possum in the garden, and the dogs were after it.
:grumble:
Got up, put on some clothes, and went to look. Yup there was a possum and it was acting inert. No obvious injuries, but you never know. I gave it a chance to get away if it was just playing, but then I made sure it was HTG dead.
Now what am I gonna do with it? I had 2 Boxers that would make short work of disinterring anything I buried, so I stuck it in a trash bag and put it in the freezer for close to a week, then stuck it in the trash. Case closed.
There was that night, however, when the wife went rooting through the deep freeze for something to eat, and looked in the trash bag, having forgotten what was in it… She went -> :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
I found two dead ones in the road once and our cat tried to eat them. In order to prevent the cat from joining the road kill I got a shovel and a trash bag, removed them to a trash dumpster, where, if they were only playing possum and came back to life, they would be happy.
This reminds me of a Dad story. My dad worked most of his adult life at what used to be called Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant.* It had a lot of acreage and was out away from the heart of the city and there was a fair bit of wildlife that took advantage of the place. There were, among other things, possums.
Most of the employees avoided the possums, agreeing with you that they were whirling balls o’ razors. There was one old guy, though, that thought they were really tasty. He was an old employee, there, when my dad was a very new one.
My dad swore (and he would always shake his head when he said ‘I swear’, as if even in his own old age, he couldn’t quite believe it) that the old man would go out with a stick and a gunny sack. He knew how to hit the possum in just the right way. He’d give it a whack, and it would roll over, loll out its tongue and play dead.
When it did that, he’d put down the stick, open the sack, pick up the possum by the tail, bag it and put it in the trunk of his car. If anyone was watching, he’d talk about what good eating he was going to have tomorrow night.
You could feel, when he told the story, that Dad was a little sad to think of the old skills dying out.
It is now a Wastewater Treatment Plant. The word Sewage has been found to have negative connotations.
.