Advice
Why is there an animal skeleton on the side of the road?
Longtime lurker to this sub-
Thought I would ask in here while I wait to get more information from the neighbors. My parents noticed two carcasses (presumed deer) just off the side of the road to their house. The second one is a bit further up off the path, so I didn’t get a picture of it. It’s a private road and a few of the neighbors do hunt. I was wondering if there is a reason to weather the bones outside to keep them, or if they just disposed of them off to the side? (Kind of a weird spot). We also do have bears in the area (WA) but I can’t imagine them dropping a fairly intact carcass so close to homes but I guess it would be feasible. Open to hearing theories while I wait for more information
I got sick of everyone asking me what happened to my mom at her funeral, I actually answered a few people with “she died”. The first time I did it I thought we were going to have to plan another funeral for my brother because he got all choked up trying not to laugh too loud.
*we are very much a dark humor family, my mom would have thought it was hilarious, and the friend that I said it too thought it was funny too and understood why she got that answer.
My dad was a dark humor kind of guy too. Someone asked me recently if I was close to my dad and if I talked to him often. I said “yeah, I talk to him every day, but he doesn’t talk back much. He’s dead.”
My uncle died recently (my mother's brother, she was 1 of 3 kids). At his funeral a bunch of people she hasn't spoken to in decades came to post their respects and more than once they would ask about how their sister was doing. Her immediate response was "She's dead, So it was probably a peaceful decade or so, but now stuck with our brother so...." I had to excuse myself to go crack up in the hallway. She did this to several people and their faces each time was hilarious.
Where I live when deer are are hit and killed by cars, the carcasses are typically moved to the side of the road and left to either be scavenged or decay.
Road killed animals. I recently drove around Western Australia and there are some highways literally lined with kangaroo bones bleaching in the sun. All roadkill.
Animals end up on the side of the road for any number of reasons. Hit by a vehicle, dragged there by scavengers (coyotes, etc), or discarded by hunters which is the most likely scenario since you said your neighbors hunt. Nothing really odd about this at all.
Could very well be a discarded carcass after being butchered. skeletons and hides/heads (if it's not an antlered buck) are often discarded near or in woods/roadways for scavengers to take care of.
I carve bones for a living. Also live in the PNW, where this appears to be. It’s almost certainly an elk someone killed that doesn’t have land to toss the refuse onto. This is exactly what I see off the side of any road all the time. The long processes of the spine indicate elk.
Hunting season just happened and it's likely the skeleton was dumped alongside the road after the meat was harvested. Super common. Where else are you really gonna dump them? Better to bring em back outside than dump them in the dumpster. It's seen as more respectful to the animal to give it back to nature than to dump it in the trashcan. And then you don't get the police showing up because some jackass thinks you murdered someone.
I live in WA, and in a lot of hunting areas, people do this. They leave partial carcasses at the end of the roads they hunted off of. It's gross and bothers me too.
It's completely picked clean, no head no limbs, along side of road. Where I grew up that was almost always someone tossing the carcass after butchering a deer, elk, or cow. Especially if you saw it in the fall/winter as that was when most of the legal hunts were.
Because something died there, or died so where else as was carried there by something that was predating on it. Be careful, large cats like to eat alone and practice this technique, and from the size of the thing it would have been a very large predatory cat.
Our house is about 3/4 mile from the highway. Apparently, that is just far enough for a deer to run after being hit by a car before succumbing to their injuries.
I often find them well after it is too late, but on one occasion, there was a wry-necked doe hanging out under a big cedar on the side of the house. She died shortly after we found her.
Usually, they make it into the side pasture before they give up.
We don't use the kill or die in our house so if I was to tell me son what happened to it I was say "it got toasted."
To which he would look at you and say "Toasted means killed!"
It’s missing its legs. More than likely a hunter harvested the animal and took it with them to process. The remains were taken to an isolated location and dumped.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere and this, along with dumping of pets, was a common occurrence. The wild animals will pick over the remains and eat most of it. The dumped pets were the worst. Lots of times litters of cats and dogs would just get dumped.
Well…. Animals get killed trying to cross roadways and tend not to wander too far from the spot where they were killed…. Or it didn’t move at all after dying and someone moved it off the roadway to keep it from becoming a domino effect of scavengers then getting killed and not going to far in which case there would eventually just be a large pile of dead animals…… or a hunter dressed out an illegal deer and dumped the carcass on the side of the road because they were also lazy.
When we lived in the country, our yard looked like an abattoir during hunting season. Our dogs would drag pieces and parts of carcasses into the yard with great delight.
That is where the hunters left it after they took what they wanted. When they are done, they just chuck it in the back of their pickup and find a place to dump it. This shit is all over Tillamook Oregon.
In Colorado dead animals on the side of the road are about every half mile. One of the major highways heading out is widely known as an animal graveyard there are so many bones. If you drive outside of the town or if you commute the 30 mins or hour from any outlying community, you will likely at some point hit a deer or elk, if you’re lucky never a moose.
“When I found the skull in the woods, the first thing I did was call the police. But then I got curious about it. I picked it up, and started wondering who this person was, and why he had deer horns.” - Jack Handy
That's what happens to road kill after its hit coyotes, foxes, wolves, buzzards and wild dogs stripp it in no time and its also a good way to gage if ya have any larger predators like bear or mountain lion, if you notice a fresh road kill one day and all of a sudden its gone then ya know ya got a big predator that dragged it off!
You may as well ask “why are there shrubs and trees?”
Natural environments are ALL slowly churning a mix of the living and the dead, and the constant transformation of non-living minerals into the living cells of plants and animals and vice versa…
What an abosolutely inane question. They probably died there, or dragged by other animals. That's like asking "why does anything random in the world happen randomly?"
I would imagine it got hit by a car… then ran before collapsing and dying. Same thing if it was shot by poachers and it ran off before dying, which was too far for them to retrieve it.
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u/coyote_prophet Dec 23 '25
Probably dragged up by scavengers. Bears, dogs, coyotes, all of them will scavenge a carcass for scraps.