On Friday afternoon I rode my bike home from work, to find my electrician friend, Ben, at my parents' new rental house. He informed me that he had some bad news for me. I began to panic, but he quickly told me there was a opossum in my driveway. We went outside, and sure enough, there was a rat-sized opossum at the end of my driveway. I poked at it with my dad's weed wacker, and it moved a bit and tried to get away, but an injury kept it lying there.
I went inside, called animal control, who then gave me the number to wild life animal rescue. I spoke with Joel, who said he would drive over and take a look. He asked me to wait outside and keep watch over the opossum. I went outside to find that rigormortis had set in. Joel drives up in his white Prius. He is in his 60's, white haired, neat. He takes a look at our opossum friend, affirms that it is actually dead, and tells me that you can tell, because it's pale. I told him that I would know when opossums looked pale. He replied that their lips are usually pink. Joel likes opossums. He has 23 at home. He helped me bag it up so I could avoid experiencing my gag reflex, and we decided that the corpse should go in my garbage and not his, because my garbage collection comes sooner. Yeah for me.
In other opossum education, opossums are unlikely to get rabies because they have a relatively low body temperature. They do, however, carry fleas. I have my rabies vaccination just in case.
