Dead animal removal in Cornwall and Devon

What we remove

Foxes, by a long way. That's the call we get most. Nearly always a back garden, a shed base, or the gap under a deck.

The animals. Foxes and badgers most often. Rats and squirrels. Deer now and then, which is a two-person job. Birds too, mostly pigeons and gulls that have come down a chimney or died in a gutter. We take cats and dogs, and we take whatever your own dog has dragged in from a hedge and left on the patio.

The awkward places. Under decking is the classic, and it usually means lifting boards. Then lofts and cavity walls, gaps beneath floorboards, chimneys, blocked drains and garden ponds. If a board has to come up or a panel has to come off, we'll do that and put it back the way we found it.

The smell is normally the first you know about it. You'll notice it days before you find anything. By then it's somewhere you can't easily reach. A dead rat under floorboards is the one people live with longest, because it's the hardest to place.

Sometimes the animal is the least of it. If the garden has gone over completely and the fox is simply what you found while looking at the rest, that's a garden clearance. We'll quote the two together.

Remains your dog has dug up

Get the dog inside first. Before you look at it properly, before you go for a bag, before anything else. A dog that's been mouthing a carcass will go straight back to it, and a dog that's rolled in one carries it through the house. Don't let them lick it and don't let them roll.

Then ring us. What your dog has found has usually been in the ground a while, and that changes the job. The surface is the easy part. The soil underneath holds whatever has drained out of the animal, and leptospirosis lives in exactly that, carried in the urine of rats and picked up through a lick or a cut. If it's been warm there'll be blowfly maggots in it already. We lift the remains, treat the ground they were sitting in, and take the soil away too if it's bad enough to warrant it.

If your dog has had it in their mouth, phone your vet. Don't wait to see whether they get ill. A partly decomposed animal carries bacteria a dog has no defence against, and your vet would far rather see them early than after a bad night.

Why this isn't one to do yourself

You can move a dead bird with a spade and a bin bag. Most of the rest, leave it. Anything that's been down more than a day or two is a bacterial culture. What has soaked into the soil or the brickwork under it is worse than the animal itself. Disturb it the wrong way and you spread blowfly maggots across the whole area instead of removing them.

Then there's what killed it. A rat or a squirrel found dead in the open has often taken poison somewhere, and that poison is still in the body, which is a problem for whatever eats it next. Handle it bare-handed, or let a dog near it, and you've moved the problem rather than dealt with it. Bag it and bin it without treating the ground, and the smell is back in a fortnight as soon as the weather warms up.

What's included

Four things, on every job. We remove the animal. We disinfect the ground or the surface it was lying on. Where the smell has gone into soil and brickwork we treat that separately, which takes longer and is the part people don't expect. And we take it away and dispose of it legally.

Disposal means a cremation centre at Higher Drift, just outside Penzance. It's a short run from our yard in Hayle. That's the main reason we can turn these round in a day rather than a week. Nothing goes in a skip. We're a registered waste carrier with the Environment Agency, EA registration CBDU590448, and there's more on how we handle disposal if you want it.

If it's your own pet, say so when you call. They go to the same cremation centre and we can have the ashes sent back to you. We handle the removal and the journey, not burials.

Where an animal has died inside and the smell has gone through a whole room, that's usually a removal plus a deep clean. We'll tell you on the phone whether you need both or just the one.

Areas we cover

We work out of a yard in Hayle and cover the whole of Cornwall from there. West and mid: Penzance, Camborne, Redruth and Helston, then Truro, Falmouth, Newquay and St Austell. North to Bodmin and up to Bude. East through Liskeard, Launceston and Saltash, then over the Tamar.

In Devon we're in Plymouth most weeks, along with Tavistock and Okehampton. Exeter, Newton Abbot and Torquay are all regular runs. North Devon too, so Barnstaple, Bideford and Tiverton. We get called out for dead animal removal in Plymouth and Exeter about as often as anywhere in Cornwall. Anything a long way east of Exeter, ring first and we'll be straight with you about whether 24 hours is realistic that week.

Emergency calls in Truro we reach quickest, being closest to the yard. If it's a whole property rather than one animal, we've separate pages for house clearance in Truro, Penzance, Plymouth and Exeter.