A Sad Ending (do not read if you are easily upset by an animal's death)

[debodun]

I posted a few months ago about wild rabbits that occasionally visit my yard. Yesterday I was mowing the lawn and saw a rabbit's head like it was just just sitting there in the grass. The grass was fairly long since I had not cut it since the last week in August. I thought that it would hop away as I got closer with the mower, and wondered why it hadn't already, but it just stayed there. I stopped mowing and went to look and it was a dead rabbit or more correctly half a rabbit - it's back half was missing. I felt badly and am still wondering what could have happened to it - attacked by another animal, hit by a car and it managed to get into the yard and then partially eaten by a scavenger. Maybe it was injured from home construction two houses away where they are digging up the yard with back hoes and bulldozers and may have dug up a rabbit burrow and injured one and it managed to get over to my yard, died and was scavenged. It was fairly fresh - I didn't detect any really bad odor. And it's unusual position. I would expect if it were dead to be lying on its side, not like it was sitting up. I got a shovel and scooped it into a plastic bag for disposal next trash day as per advice of thw local police, who also advised not to touch it directly (like I would) since they recently had to deal with a rabid fox. I still feel distressed about it.