Hold up! Don't be calling the police just yet. I'm pretty sure it's not a HUMAN corpse. That would be seen by the naked eye. Nothing seems out of place in the garage. It's just the smell. I'd say that body has been dead for about 5 days. The odor started off faint, rose to a crescendo, and is now starting to fade.
The Pony thinks it might be a bat. We've had them "hanging around" by the louvered vents up high. I'd think more along the lines of a mouse, but we don't have cats to kill them any more. It seems unusual that a mouse might die of natural causes in the garage. The dogs are only in there when I come home, and they are at my heels the moment I step down from T-Hoe.
When I got home on Tuesday, my little Jack was in the garage with me, waiting at the people door to go out. He was looking up high, at the shelves over the two large lidded trash cans where Farmer H stores the dog food he pours out of the bag.
I didn't have the gumption to peruse those shelves for a corpse.
6 comments:
With 4 cats in the house, we don't worry about mice much anymore. However, bats are a bit less intelligent, evidently, because they still occasionally will find themselves trapped in the attic. We don't hear them when they are alive but find them after they have died and there's never any smell. Mind you, this attic was full of mouse droppings, when we moved in. My poor husband had to clean them all up, wearing a respirator and gloves and it was so hot, even though it still wasn't summer. After he got all the poop, he scrubbed it down and we haven't seen any sign of mice since, thankfully. Ranee
Rae,
I'm glad your husband was well-protected for that job. The Hanta Virus is no joke!
At one time we had five outdoor cats. Two intentional, and three we rescued from wandering along the creek down by Mailbox Row as kittens. They loved to leave a portion of mouse carcass in front of the front door. It was some internal organ that I did not recognize, attached to a bit of stringy stuff. I don't know why they didn't eat that one part.
We had a couple mice get into the attic once. Noticed because we heard a scurrying while watching TV, and saw droppings in the master bathroom ceiling light/exhaust fan. Farmer H and Genius went up in the attic to set traps. Caught one. Then another the next day. No problem up there since, but every few years we'd get a little field mouse in the basement until Farmer H fixed the weather-stripping around the steel door to the outside.
For just a second I thought the "corpse" might be T-Hoe who finally fell apart. I'm glad I was wrong.
River,
NOOOOO! She didn't mean it, Universe! That thought is not floating around all willy-nilly, waiting to manifest!
That particular smell, the smell of decomposing tissue is distinct and not very pleasant. I keep my dogfood in a large trashcan, too. Once I found a live mouse in it! This was several years ago. I dragged it outside and dumped the whole shebang onto the grass and Martha, the boy cat caught the little thief and executed him for his crime!
Kathy,
Kudos to the executioner! Boy-Martha was a force to be reckoned with!
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