Inevitability

The fairy-tale ending in a chick-flick...
Frizzy hair on beach day...
Massive blisters after breaking in a new pair of heels through a night out dancing...

Some things in life are just inevitable...

...like how on long weekends, lots and lots of stuff will get hit.

Today was really busy (catching up on all the death from the weekend); yet, when looking back on my day, I thought that nothing particularly abnormal struck me as noteworthy.

Then I begin to think --today I picked up...

-a dead cat that had an eyeball dangling from it's socket
-half a dozen squirrels (it's a wonder they keep their population up)
-a ridiculously, wretched smelling opossum that I had to tie outside of my van
-another dead cat that seemed okay from the front, but had essentially pooped out its insides
-a bloated raccoon
- and I'd also fended off a horde of wasps in picking up a dead duck along some trail

There were more animals I'm sure, but after a while they start to blend together. Again, another inevitable result of my job I suppose. However, I'd like to note that in my case becoming jaded as an incredibly good thing.

What I can't understand is how, in my line of work, some other people choose to ignore the inevitable problems that arise from dead animals; i.e. stench, flies, maggots.

Last week I got a call for a dead opossum in a family's backyard. (For the record, calls on people's property are generally fairly intact as they haven't been rotting for too long before getting called in.) But this mom decided to go against the grain. This animal had been rotting for, oh, probably a month. The smell was unreal. I stood there and just looked at the darn thing for two minutes watching its skin literally crawl and ripple from the maggots.

I had two options:
1) Gloved/normal bagging technique
2) Shovel

Ah, I'll just grab it and get it over with -it's faster as it's a hassle fumbling with an open bag, and I didn't really want to deal with the obscene amount of maggots for any longer than necessary.

I chose wrong.

I grabbed and bagged him, but a lot of good that did. I basically got the skeletal structure and head while the rest of the flesh just kind of... schlumped off... and what I was left with looked like a 5 lb bucket of maggots, fur, and fleshy bits had been dumped out on the grass (mostly maggots though). I tried using the shovel (for the first time might I add) but... I think I just ended up spreading it around more.

Ah well, what did they expect? To leave a rotting animal and have it magically disappear without a mess? It would have been so much easier to deal with if she'd called it in right away... or just picked it up herself (she probably doesn't have a pair of Man-Pants though).