URGENT! Sick squirrel i found

Just found this guy on the road and thought he got hit, but he REAKS of cloves and is sick and can't breathe. Is it poison ya think? I googled and got nada.
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Yes it's blood around both eyes and his whole jaw was swollen. I put him down, figured it was a lost cause. He was laying right in front of my neighbor's driveway where kids and dogs walk. I didn't want someone getting poisoned or a hawk taking it. If I would've nursed it back to health and released it, I wouldve ended up shooting later anyhow lol. I don't like people poisoning things for this reason, it shouldn't have to suffer.

I'm pretty sure it was my neighbor, he is definitely eye balling me right now. Might have to tell him to chill on the poison and let me continue the shooting. The squirrels are seriously bad this year here, I've downed 14 in 3 days, and they just keep coming. The guy has a garden too, and a compost pile that's attracting them and lord knows what else.
 
I really do despise seeing animals poisoned. It's a slow and torturous death for sure, and it's all but guaranteed to be. I've witnessed it several times, and will never use it myself. Not even on a pest causing the most extreme of damage.

Funny thing is, it tends to be the vegan-shouting hippies that are the first ones to grab poison as a solution since they don't know any better. Sad.
 
I'm going to keep an eye out for anymore sick ones, I hope this was some weird fluke. The clove oil stench was really strange. Maybe it got into a bottle of tooth ache ointment in the trash somewhere. That eugenoil works wonders on a sore tooth, but I can't see them being that attracted to the smell and taste, it's horrible.

His face was all wet, but that could've been from slobber. I just hope my dog doesn't get ahold of one dead back in the brush, she's little and it would surely end her. She's 18 and frail.
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I bet he was hit by a car. Many times they are hit by the undercarriage in the head as they run underneath. His head looks bruised.

I tend to leave them alone. They sometimes survive.
He was definitely poisoned. He may have been hit, or fallen from being sick. Someone or somehow he got ahold of cloves or clove oil. It was so strong I smelled it when I got close to him and it even the smell got on my hands through a plastic bag. I washed up really good and put on nitrile gloves before taking out of the bag and euthanazing him.

If it wasn't for the obvious odor, I'd say he got clipped by a car too.
 
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I’m pretty sure my neighbors are putting out poison.
Seems the animals come to my front walkway to die. All during the day. One rat slow and lethargic. One mouse. A feral cat that was very wild. But not when it was poisoned. Then just last Saturday I came across a squirrel that could not run far from me and when it did it was like it was drunk. I immediately grabbed the pellet gun and put it down.
 
I really do despise seeing animals poisoned. It's a slow and torturous death for sure, and it's all but guaranteed to be. I've witnessed it several times, and will never use it myself. Not even on a pest causing the most extreme of damage.

Funny thing is, it tends to be the vegan-shouting hippies that are the first ones to grab poison as a solution since they don't know any better. Sad.
Unfortunately, the comment about hypocrites has truth in it. Where we lived for a few years, the former pastor/peaceloveandkindness neighbor couple ran over breathlessly and warned me that a “sick” rat had just run out of their yard and was probably coming to mine.

And lo, as I looked around the grass, she pointed to one practically at my feet. Breathing raggedly with great heaving effort, it was obviously dying. I looked the two people right in the eyes and said, “It isn’t sick—it’s POISONED.” At which point the pastor hemmed and hawed and admitted that the poisoners “might” have been them. I already knew about their rotting, vermin-infested old shed and just stared at him. I grabbed an old cardboard box and trapped the rat under it, knowing it would be dead very soon and wanting to prevent other animals from eating it.

But the charade did not stop there. In his continued effort to find out what kind of gun I owned (he had heard that I kept a handgun), they asked that I put the rat out of its misery by “using your gun on it.” Fake greenies! I put a stop to that idiocy by curtly saying, “It’s for killing bad people, not small rodents!”

I didn’t need to blow a big hole in the rat and jeopardize nearby people or property. The rat was dead moments later when I lifted the box.

And there were never any more questions from them about the bad-people-killing gun.
 
It's just like everything else with people like that. Out of sight out of mind. It's not affecting them or so they think. Till their cat or dog gets sick and they take it to the vet or it dies, just to find out the poison they out out is what killed it. Or worse, a child or grandkid get ahold of it. Its way more reckless than a pellet to the head of the pest. People are so scared of guns nowadays, what a weak society we have become. You don't have to like guns, but they do have their place.
 
I’d bet the poison used on the rat was ancient arsenic-based stuff. The guy probably had crap from 40-50 years earlier in his stash.

As for cloves, that rings a bell, but I can’t think which poison that was. Even if the stuff was not considered deadly to rodents, maybe your neighbor gave that squirrel a megadose in some otherwise-tasty morsel. Dogs can be harmed by eating dark chocolate, but it takes a lot. Someone told me their dogs ate one lb of chocolates. They had terrible diarrhea for a couple of days, before recovering.
 
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I’d bet the poison used on the rat was ancient arsenic-based stuff. The guy probably had crap from 40-50 years earlier in his stash.

As for cloves, that rings a bell, but I can’t think which poison that was. Even if the stuff was not considered deadly to rodents, maybe your neighbor gave that squirrel a megadose in some otherwise-tasty morsel. Dogs can be harmed by eating dark chocolate, but it takes a lot. Someone told me their dogs ate one lb of chocolates. They had terrible diarrhea for a couple of days, before recovering.
I left my dogs in the truck one time to run into the store to grab some beer. Had my black lab/pit mix(best dog ever), and my wild ass husky. Also had a fresh box of fundraiser chocolate bars in the cab and didn't think much of it.

I come back out less than 5 minutes later and my lab is looking at me like "I didn't do it". I look at the husky and she's covered in chocolate and just happy as a clam! ENTIRE BOX INCLUDING FOIL WRAPPERS GONE.

Called the vet, he told me give her a couple table spoons of peroxide and it'll make her vomit. He wasn't lying! Let her outside and it was like puking up milk shake after milk shake. Then my idiot Rottweiler tried to lick it up.... dogs.
 
Cloves contain eugenol which can be toxic in large amounts. One of the symptoms is capillary bleeding. I have not heard it used as a poison nor do I know how you can get something to eat it, but there you are. Warfarin is a blood thinner used in some poisons, it is also used therapeutically in humans to thin blood. All depends on the amount. It is a puzzler to me how someone would pick cloves to poison something unless they observed this happen in the past. Let us know if you find out what happened.
 
A vet could of done a necropsy and told you exactly what it was. There is one around here that if he suspects poison, goes out of his way to find out who did it and tries to bring charges against them. Not because he's a tree hugger or anything, just knows the downstream effects and tries to prevent it. Glad you grabbed some gloves before handling it, tho.
 
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I did my good deed for the month. Was in Lowes to get some weed killer and gopher gassers when I met a guy who just bought a double wide that hadn't been lived in for a long time. He was telling me how it was infested with rats and mice and was looking for some way to get rid of them. He had a couple of traps and some repair materials and was looking at the poisons. I talked him back off the ledge and told him to check out Mousetrap Mondays on you tube and maybe look into a multipump .22. His heart really wasn't into the poisons, thankfully.