By county
Florida dead animal rules, county by county
Nine counties covering roughly 13,347,885 people. These are the places where the published position is clear enough to be worth writing down, and where the answers differ enough from each other to matter.
No operator coverage is confirmed in any of them. These pages exist to tell you what your local government publishes, including where that is better than you would expect.
Miami-Dade County
Southeast Florida · 2,838,461 residents
Miami-Dade draws the line more plainly than almost anywhere else in Florida. The county picks up from the public right-of-way, and only when nobody owns the animal. On your own property it says the responsibility is yours, and it closes the cheap way out as well.
Read the rule →Broward County
Southeast Florida · 2,037,472 residents
Broward has no countywide answer. What you get depends on which of its thirty-odd cities you live in, and the cities genuinely differ. Two tell you to hire someone. One publishes a number for animals on your own property.
Read the rule →Palm Beach County
Southeast Florida · 1,582,055 residents
The county code puts the duty on whoever owned the animal, which quietly leaves wildlife unaccounted for. Inside West Palm Beach itself, the city publishes a scheduled pickup for dead animals, domestic or wild, and puts no property limit on it.
Read the rule →Hillsborough County and Tampa
Tampa Bay · 1,581,426 residents
Tampa says in one sentence that its Solid Waste Department cannot retrieve carcasses from private property. The county, for its part, publishes instructions for doing it yourself and takes reports only from the public right-of-way.
Read the rule →Pinellas County and St. Petersburg
Tampa Bay · 965,870 residents
St. Petersburg is one of the few Florida cities whose sanitation department lists dead animal collection as one of its own services. Clearwater, ten miles away, limits itself to roads and medians. The county code says nothing at all.
Read the rule →Orange County and Orlando
Central Florida · 1,533,646 residents
Orange County's ordinance does contain a line about Animal Services disposing of remains on private property. It is narrower than it sounds, it starts with an officer finding the animal rather than you reporting it, and there is no resident channel to request it.
Read the rule →Jacksonville and Duval County
Northeast Florida · 1,055,159 residents
Jacksonville scopes its free service by distance rather than by ownership. If the animal is within fifty feet of a school, a bus stop, a city building or a city road, the city will take it, and a lot of front yards sit inside that band.
Read the rule →Lee and Collier Counties
Southwest Florida · 1,277,192 residents
Southwest Florida publishes the bluntest refusals in the state. Fort Myers bars its employees from private property. Collier excludes not just your yard but any development or community. Cape Coral goes further and names private companies on its own page.
Read the rule →Sarasota County
Southwest Florida · 476,604 residents
Sarasota County has the most homeowner-friendly ordinance we found in Florida. It says a dead animal shall be disposed of by Animal Services on the request of the owner of the property where it is found. Check it before you hire anyone.
Read the rule →Not listed here? Florida has sixty-seven counties and several hundred municipalities, and most publish nothing at all on this. Where your county is silent, that is silence rather than permission or refusal, and the general guide is the better starting point.