Who collects all the dead animals on the side of the road?

[Stripitout]

Presumably the council - but when? And how?

Just thinking you see dead deer, foxes, badgers all the time but you don’t see them in any real state of decomposition. You don’t see skeletons.

But on the motorway - they must have to close a lane to safely stop a van and collect (just thinking about the massive dead deer I saw this morning)

Some zoos and safari parks collect deer carcasses from the roadside. They're notified by the Council

Yesterday in the pouring rain I saw a Highways man parked on the hard shoulder of the M1 with a spade picking up a dead fox?/dog. I couldn't believe that the lane wasn't shut.

Councils do collect if notified/dangerous but sadly where I am (fairly rural) they just rot away at the side of the road. I think often they get driven over so many times that they break up and disappear that way. Always horrifies me really.

My grandfather told one of my great aunts about a roadkill pheasant and she went to collect it for her tea.

She also pulled a chicken carcass out of a neighbour's bin because she thought there was too much meat on it to be thrown out.

I am vegetarian so although I am the dead spit of her, DH doesn't have to worry about me doing more than bringing a roadkill potato into the house.

Agree in the past people picked up roadkill, round here they would collect deer, but now it just rots 😢

It is usually the waste disposal team at the local Council who collects them. Most local authority waste disposal services are contracted out to private companies.

The Councils near me all have online and/or telephone reporting for this issue and I would guess that most are reported by members of the public.

At the Council I used to work for, a maintenance worker would be on call for such jobs, on a rota basis. He (or rarely, she) would collect any dead animals and bury them on a patch of wasteland owned by the Council.

The red kites do most of the road cleaning around us.

I expect a lot of carcasses are exploited by carrion feeders too.

But where are the skeletons then if they aren’t being picked up everywhere?

This is really bugging me sorry, I know I sound like a whinging toddler asking why why why!

Growing up we lived close to a farm that had an incinerator used by the council to dispose of roadkill. We’d regularly smell the van as it went past 🤢

It rains and then gets washed into the roads and then crushed by cars

I think it's the motorway maintenance crews who get the task of clearing anything hazardous from main roads/dual carriageways/motorways - whether that's roadkill or any other debris, and I think they have well practiced procedures for assessing if they need to take a lane out whilst it's being made safe.

Council do other roads/pavements and even parks - I live not far from a park where a large fox, which had been struck by a vehicle and crawled off to die (my guess from its injuries and location), was lying in bushes near the children's playground, and a council crew cleared it away. An unenviable job!

I used to have to regularly walk half a mile along a B road and I kept seeing badgers that had been hit and killed.

I tried not to look but those memories are still quite disturbing.

🤢

Well quite mrstumbler my mother was horrified by that story, as was I when she told it to me.

I also think it's the council for the bigger things.

I remember a magpie was hit at a junction of the A228 that I'd take to work every day, and it got sort of swept to the side of the road. The inside must have rotted away and left the shell of bones and feathers, which remained there for about a year or more... I always noticed it!