If you’ve found a dead squirrel in your yard, on the street, or inside your home, the safest approach is to bag it up while wearing gloves and dispose of it in your household trash or contact your city’s animal control for pickup. The whole process takes about five minutes, but there are a few important precautions to protect yourself, your family, and your pets.
How to Safely Pick Up and Dispose of It
Never handle a dead squirrel with bare hands. Rubber or latex disposable gloves are the best choice because they’re cheap, available at any drugstore, and you can throw them away afterward. If you don’t have gloves handy, a sturdy plastic bag turned inside out over your hand works as a makeshift barrier.
Before picking up the squirrel, spray the carcass with a flea and tick spray if you have one available. Fleas and ticks don’t die when their host does. They’ll crawl off the body looking for a new host, and that could be you, your dog, or your cat. A quick spray reduces that risk significantly.
Place the squirrel into a plastic bag and seal it. If the animal looked visibly sick before it died, had patchy fur, or was behaving strangely, double-bag it. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife recommends double-bagging any carcass where a disease like tularemia or rabies is suspected. Tie each bag tightly and place it in your outdoor trash bin. Don’t put it in a compost bin or recycling cart.
After disposal, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water even if you wore gloves. If any of the animal’s blood, urine, or other fluids touched your skin, wash that area immediately. Disinfect any tools you used, like a shovel, with a bleach solution.
What Your City Will (and Won’t) Do
Many municipalities offer free dead animal collection. If the squirrel is on a public road or sidewalk, your city’s animal control or public works department will typically pick it up at no charge. Some cities, like San Antonio, also collect dead animals from residential curbs if you bag the carcass and leave it out for them.
There are limits, though. Most city services won’t retrieve animals from attics, crawl spaces, underneath buildings, or deep inside private property. If the squirrel died in a hard-to-reach spot inside your home, you’ll likely need to either retrieve it yourself or hire a wildlife removal company. A quick call to your local animal control office will clarify what they cover in your area.
Disease Risks Worth Knowing About
Dead squirrels can carry diseases that spread to humans through direct contact. The most significant one is tularemia, a bacterial infection that squirrels and other rodents are especially susceptible to. You can get infected by handling a sick or dead animal, through broken skin, or even by inhaling contaminated dust. The Washington State Department of Health notes that running over carcasses with lawn mowers is a surprisingly common way people get exposed, because it kicks up bacteria-laden particles into the air.
Tularemia symptoms include fever, chills, headache, and body aches, often alongside swollen lymph nodes or a skin ulcer at the site of contact. In more serious cases, it can cause pneumonia. It’s treatable with antibiotics, but it’s much better to avoid it entirely by wearing gloves and not disturbing carcasses with yard equipment. If you’re about to mow your lawn, do a quick scan of the area for any dead animals first.
Rabies is the other disease people worry about, but the actual risk from squirrels is extremely low. Michigan’s public health guidelines classify squirrels alongside hamsters, gerbils, and rabbits as animals that are “rarely infected with rabies and have not been known to transmit rabies to humans.” State labs generally won’t even test squirrels for rabies except by special arrangement.
If Your Dog or Cat Found It First
Dogs love to pick up dead animals, and if yours got to the squirrel before you did, the situation is less alarming than it feels. Because squirrels are not meaningful rabies carriers, a dog mouthing or chewing on a dead squirrel doesn’t carry the same urgency as contact with a raccoon or bat.
That said, tularemia, intestinal parasites, and fleas are real concerns. If your dog is current on rabies vaccination and picks up a dead squirrel, Michigan guidelines recommend a booster vaccine and 45 days of observation at home. For unvaccinated dogs, the protocols are much stricter, potentially involving months of quarantine. This is one of many reasons keeping your pets current on rabies shots matters.
Watch your pet for a few days after the encounter. Vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy, loss of appetite, or swollen lymph nodes are all reasons to call your vet. Also check your pet’s fur for fleas or ticks that may have jumped from the carcass.
Dead Squirrel in Your Attic or Walls
A squirrel that dies inside your home presents a different challenge: the smell. In an enclosed space like an attic or wall cavity, decomposition odor typically lasts at least two to three weeks and can persist longer depending on temperature and ventilation. Warmer conditions speed up decomposition but also intensify the smell in the short term. In dry attic environments, the carcass may eventually mummify rather than fully decompose, which shortens the odor period somewhat.
If you can locate and access the carcass, remove it using the same glove-and-bag method described above. Open windows and use fans to ventilate the area afterward. An enzymatic odor neutralizer (sold at pet stores) works better on biological smells than standard air fresheners. If the squirrel is sealed inside a wall and you can’t reach it without cutting drywall, you’ll need to decide whether the smell is tolerable enough to wait out or worth the cost of hiring someone to open the wall and extract it.
Once the carcass is removed, inspect the area for entry points. If one squirrel got in, others can too. Look for gaps along the roofline, soffit vents with damaged screens, or openings where utility lines enter the house.
What Not to Do
- Don’t mow over it. Running a lawn mower over a dead squirrel aerosolizes bacteria and is a documented source of tularemia infections.
- Don’t bury it in a shallow hole. Dogs and other animals will dig it up. If you prefer burial over trash disposal, go at least two feet deep.
- Don’t handle it without gloves. Even if the squirrel looks freshly dead and “clean,” fleas, ticks, and bacteria on its fur or skin pose real risks.
- Don’t leave it for days. A carcass left in your yard attracts flies, maggots, and scavenging animals. The sooner you remove it, the fewer secondary problems you’ll deal with.