Lansing area
Pickup from the yard, the drive or the field
You can see it and you know where it is. This is the simplest version of dead animal removal in Lansing, priced on getting to it and hauling it off.
Raccoons and opossums by the trash cans, a groundhog that died under the swing set, a fox at the tree line of a Delhi Township lot, a cat somebody hit and dragged itself onto your lawn. The operator bags it, loads it and disposes of it, and the soil or mulch immediately under it can usually go too.
When it is worth paying somebody
Under Michigan's Bodies of Dead Animals Act a carcass on your property is yours to dispose of within 24 hours, and the lawful routes for a homeowner come down to burial at least two feet deep or handing it to a licensed dead animal dealer. Two feet of digging for a raccoon is a chore. Two feet for a deer is an afternoon with a spade, and the ground in Ingham County is not always cooperative.
So the call makes sense when the animal is bigger than you want to lift into a bag, when it has been there long enough that lifting it is not the only problem, or when it is somewhere awkward: down a window well, wedged under a fence, at the far end of a field where you would need the truck anyway.
What it does not make sense for is a carcass in the road. That belongs to whoever maintains the road, and the deer page walks through which agency that is, because it comes up most with deer.
What to say on the call
- The address and ZIP.
- Roughly what it is and how big.
- How long it has been there, even as a guess.
- Whether a truck can get near it.
- A dog in the yard, a locked gate, anything that changes access.
Price
Set by size, age and access, quoted before the work. The factors, in plain terms.
If it turns out not to be in the open
A carcass you can smell but not see is a different job, and so is one that has crawled under the deck to die. Recovery from a garage, attic, crawl space or deck covers the reachable-but-enclosed cases. A smell with no source covers the rest.