海角大神

It seems like only yesterday that I met Rocky. Probably because it was yesterday.

Our smallest cat Caramel was staring intently upward. Following his gaze, I spied Rocky tucked between two branches high in the silver maple near our deck.

Rocky didn鈥檛 look well. Raccoons aren鈥檛 usually out and about at 3:00 on a sunny afternoon. Lounging in the sun isn鈥檛 their thing.

Esther and I thought about calling the animal control authorities鈥搑abies is not unheard of around here鈥揵ut decided to wait until morning to see if Rocky looked better. No point harassing (or worse) the poor guy if he鈥檚 just an eccentric raccoon who wanted some sun.

A higher authority came calling overnight, though, and Esther found Rocky motionless under our deck.

Wild animals are one of my domestic responsibilities, so it fell to me to go poke Rocky with a stick to check his status. Result: deceased.

So what do you do with a dead raccoon?

This is precisely the sort of question at which the web excels. Sure enough, 鈥渄ead raccoon鈥� generates more than 30,000 hits on Google. But they boil down to only three flavors of advice: (1) Do it yourself, (2) Make it someone else鈥檚 problem, or (3) Turn it into a media sensation by claiming you鈥檝e discovered a monster.

#3 wasn鈥檛 really an option 鈥� Rocky was clearly a raccoon 鈥� so I tried the nice version of #2, calling Montgomery County Animal Control to see if they handle deceased raccoons. No dice. If the deceased is on your property, it鈥檚 your responsibility 鈥� bag him and put in the trash was the advice. If he were on a county road, however, that would be a different matter. Then the county would pick him up.

Fair enough. Property rights ought to convey responsibilities as well as ownership. I鈥檓 good with that. But I couldn鈥檛 miss the implied incentive. If I were so inclined, I could simply pick Rocky up, suitably attired in latex gloves etc. (me, not him), and deposit him by the curb. I suspect such littering is a popular strategy. People do respond to incentives after all. See, e.g., Stacey Robinsmith鈥檚 .

Being a respecter of property rights and embracer of responsibility, however, I went with option #1. Here are some tips if you ever find yourself in a similar circumstance:

• Fortune favors the swift. Rigor mortis is your friend. Just trust me on this.

• Raccoons have claws; use extra bags. Several cheery folks recommended putting Rocky in a trash bag. Well, his claws sliced right through that when I placed him inside. I ended up going with a full-on Babushka doll solution 鈥� five nested bags. That might have been a teensy bit excessive. But I suspect the garbage collectors will appreciate it.

• Burial would, of course, be a more natural solution. But given the number of dogs, cats, and other critters that roam the neighborhood and dig better than I do, that seemed like a bad idea with Rocky鈥檚 suspicious cause of death.

RIP Rocky.

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