Dead animal pickup times in Toronto prolonged by spike in calls

It can now take weeks for City of Toronto staff to retrieve an animal cadaver after it's reported. And that track record stinks, according to one city councillor.

A motion by Brad Bradford (Ward 19, Beaches-East York) that calls on the city to trim that response time down to 48 hours passed at last week's council meeting.

"You go around the neighbourhoods in Toronto and you can find the cadavers just rotting in the street," he said. "The reality is, in many instances, nothing is happening."

Dead animal pickup is the responsibility of animal services — one of the six city services carried out by Municipal Licensing and Standards (MLS). MLS executive director Carleton Grant said the cadaver pickup target had been 48 hours, but by last year that target was proving to be too ambitious.

In fact, of the 14,000 calls for cadaver pickup the city received last year, it hit the 48 hour window only 62 per cent of the time, Bradford's motion states, giving it the worst track record of all the services overseen by MLS.

"Sixty per cent, when I went to school, was not a very good grade," Bradford said.

But instead of working to improve its performance, Bradford said, MLS lowered the bar, dropping its expected response time from 48 hours to five business days in January 2024.

Grant acknowledged in an interview with CBC Toronto that even that new, five-day target isn't always being met by city staff. For instance, he said the average time to pick up a cadaver this week has reached 11 days, thanks to a spike in calls.

"I have dozens of emails in my inbox every week about animal cadavers that have been left on the road for sometimes in excess of 12, 14, 19 days," Bradford said.

Part of the problem, Grant said, is the need for animal services staff to prioritize responding to live animal calls, such as dog maulings or coyote sightings.

"I understand the frustration when [residents] see a cadaver on their sidewalk or on their street for a lengthy number of days," he said. "However we do need to prioritize sick and injured animals over dead [ones]."

Grant said the city has a limited number of animal services staff who are trying to cope with an increased number of calls for dead animals.

"With the growth of our city, with the growth of our population, there's been more conflict," he said. "[Animals] are on the losing end."

Bradford's motion asks staff to develop a budget that takes into account funding for a new animal services team whose sole job would be to retrieve dead animals — a request that Grant says he made last month as part of MLS's 2025 budget requests. He won't know whether that request has been approved until early next year, he said.