Dead Deer Removal

Our Dead Deer Removal Process

Of everything on this site, this is the shortest process — on purpose. You've had enough of a morning.

1. Tell us where it is and what shape it's in. Location, how close it is to the drive or road, how easy it is to reach, and how long it's been down. That's all we need to price the job over the phone. Every removal is a custom quote — access, size, and condition set it — and we'll walk you through both choices: full removal with licensed disposal, or the lower-cost move to the roadside where your town handles pickup from there.

2. We roll up with the right gear. A fresh road strike on the front lawn, a carcass that's been in the tree line for a week, a doe that dropped into the pool sometime in the night — no two of those are the same call, and we show up carrying the equipment and protective gear yours calls for, gloved up before anyone touches the animal. The crew works fast and low-key; most of the street never notices.

3. Removal, disposal, and done. For a full haul-off we contain the carcass, clear the contact area, and haul the animal off to a licensed facility for proper disposal. For the roadside option, we move it to the right-of-way where the road authority will collect it. Either way, you don't lift it, touch it, or spend an afternoon figuring out where a deer can legally go.

Why You Shouldn't Handle a Dead Deer Yourself

It weighs more than it looks. A mature whitetail runs about the weight of a grown adult, and once it bloats it gets heavier and far harder to grip. Hauling one across the yard without equipment is how people throw out their backs — and dragging a carcass smears fluids, hair, and parasites right across the grass the kids play on.

The ticks outlive the deer. Deer are the preferred host of the ticks Middle Tennessee homeowners actually deal with, and a single animal can carry them by the dozen. The moment the body goes cold those ticks start hunting a warm replacement — and whoever crouches down beside the carcass is the closest one. In Tennessee that mostly means lone star and American dog ticks, which spread ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and the red-meat allergy called alpha-gal; blacklegged ticks and Lyme are here too, just less common than up North. A downed deer is a tick pile. Treat it like one.

Assume it could be sick. Chronic Wasting Disease is established in Tennessee, and a deer carrying it can look perfectly normal right up to the end. Only a lab can tell. The CDC's guidance is blunt: keep away from a dead deer's head, spine, and lymph nodes — the tissues that hold the most prions — which for a homeowner really means leaving the whole animal alone.

You can't legally toss it. Curbside pickup and most convenience centers won't take a carcass, and burying it in the backyard is a worse plan than it sounds — too shallow and every scavenger in the neighborhood digs it back up; too near a well and you've made a groundwater problem; and where CWD exists, burial risks planting prions in your own dirt, where they can stay dangerous for years. We take every deer to a licensed facility so you're never guessing what's allowed.

Your town most likely won't come get it. In Tennessee the system covers roads, not yards. TDOT clears carcasses from state routes and interstates; city and county road crews handle their own local streets; and in Davidson County, Metro Public Works works the Metro roadways. But the instant the deer is on private ground — your lawn, your landscaping, your pool — it becomes the property owner's problem, and TWRA doesn't do pickups. When the deer is on your side of the curb, the phone tree dead-ends at a private service. That's us — and if it's close enough to the road that your town will still take it, that's exactly when our lower-cost roadside option makes sense.

Why a Deer Ended Up on Your Property

We pull deer year-round, but the calls track the calendar. Knowing the pattern explains why it's you this week — and why it happens to Middle Tennessee neighbors far more than anyone brings up over the fence.

October into January — the rut and the rifle. Breeding season sends bucks bolting across roads at first and last light with their caution switched off, straight through rush hour, and Tennessee's fall runs long and heavy. Once the state's gun season opens, a wounded deer can cover a lot of distance before it drops — which is how a carcass turns up in a Brentwood backyard when nobody heard a shot and no car was involved.

July into October — EHD weather. Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease, carried by biting midges, spikes a deer's fever so hard the animal makes for water to cool off. That's why so many late-summer calls are ponds, pools, creeks, and the shorelines of Old Hickory and Percy Priest. Tennessee sees EHD flare-ups in warm, dry years; it's harmless to people and pets, but the cleanup is every bit as grim as it sounds.

Late winter into early spring — the thaw discoveries. A hard stretch of winter takes fawns and older deer, and the bodies surface as the cold lets go. Spring yard cleanup doubles, unhappily, as carcass-discovery season.

May and June — fawns and dispersal. Fawns that fail to thrive, plus young bucks shoved out to stake their own territory, keep a low but steady trickle of calls coming — most often in leafy subdivisions where a foot of ornamental grass can hide a downed animal for days.

And underneath the calendar is Middle Tennessee's own wrinkle: the region is building faster than almost anywhere in the country, and every new subdivision in Rutherford, Williamson, and Wilson pushes deer off old cover and into the neighborhoods that replaced it. More deer sharing more roads with more people means more strikes, more disease, and more carcasses landing where families live.

CWD Is in Tennessee. Here's What That Means for You.

Chronic Wasting Disease kills every deer that catches it, and there's no vaccine, treatment, or cure. It's caused by misfolded proteins called prions, and the prions are the worst part: they don't break down the way germs do, and once they settle into the dirt they can stay a threat for years, even decades.

For Tennessee this isn't a distant worry. TWRA first confirmed CWD in the state's wild deer in West Tennessee in 2018 and has managed it since through a designated CWD zone, mandatory testing, and rules on moving high-risk deer parts. It hasn't stayed put: the disease has since been detected in counties across the state, including parts of Middle Tennessee, and TWRA continues to test and monitor statewide. That spread is exactly why we treat every job the same regardless of where the call comes from.

Here's why it matters with a carcass at your feet: a deer carrying CWD can look completely fine for a year or more while still spreading prions. The one on your grass might have been clipped by a truck, felled by EHD, or worn down by a rough winter — or it might be carrying something no glance can reveal. The CDC's advice is plain: don't handle a dead deer's head, spine, or lymph nodes.

So every deer we handle gets run the same way — a gloved crew in full PPE, the animal bagged and sealed for the drive, and drop-off only at a licensed disposal site, never a fence row, never a back lot. In a state where CWD is already a fact rather than a rumor, disposing of a deer correctly isn't really about odor at all. It's about keeping something that outlives your mortgage out of your own ground.