I am sure anyone who was watching me the other day thinks I am peculiar. A couple houses down from where I live, a squirrel had been hit by a car. I took my wheelbarrow, my machete, and a flat head shovel and scooped it up & took it home to bury in my compost pile. I figure I am saving a few tax dollars while adding great stuff to my compost pile! (By the way, it never smelled bad).

Anyone else do such things in the name of composting? What things do you do that might be considered "different"?

Didn't go to the great lengths you did, but when clearing brush our rat terrier/beagle killed a rat about the size of a possum!! Put that in the compost pile.
Yesterday I found a dead possum-not too big-in my compost tea bucket.
I felt bad that it had drowned in there, but added it to the compost pile too.

Patty

I composted my neighbor's chicken that got killed by a dog once.
I put it under 3 feet of horse manure/hay/sawdust and leaves, and added dry molasses to speed up decomposion. It was totally vanished from the compost pile in 7-14 days!

Man, Nadine, you are sick. OF COURSE I'M JUST KIDDING!, but that's great because the squirrel will not do the pavement any help. I live out in the country so I am always adding squirrels, etc. to my compost pile. It's funny, but if they see me picking up dead animals the neighbors tend to keep their distance and not mess with me.

I composted my dog in the pile several years ago. In the mean time the pile has moved around back there ultimately exposing the area where the dog was composted. Apparently the decomposition took a lot longer than I though it would, because the skull surfaced this weekend in the mouth of my current dog.

Ouch. I'm sorry. That must have been tough. I had to have my cat put down, but could not bring myself to just add her to the pile. I buried her swaddled shell, covering the spot with a large piece of granite. I asked the vet if the product used to euthanize my cat would be harmful to the soil. She said that it would not. She is an organic gardener as well, so I trusted her...

"The human body without the soul is just garbage." ...the best recollection I have of a line from the book Catch 22

Can empathize with Nadine. Our Siamese was 17.5 years old when we put her down. She had 'taken a fancy' to a 5' fig tree I'd planted months earlier - so we 'agreed' that would be her final resting place. The fig has grown into a beautiful 'headstone', and she is remembered often as we partake of the bounty she helped to produce...
I compost a lot - but since I make it fast, and give quite a bit away, I quit putting 'critters' into my 'regular' (finish-to-harvest) piles, since my friends didn't like little skulls in their homemade potting soil mixes (picky, picky, picky)...
So maintain one (continuous-add) double-bin pile especially for fish carcasses (hopefully several 20" to 30" per week) - which also gets occasional 'road kill'. Added a 'road kill' buzzard into that pile - seemed fitting...But the huge feathers took a LONG time. And turtle shells take longer than bones. This pile gets lots of 'accelerator' to compensate for high flesh/bone content (mostly cheap dry dog food), with manure, grass clippings, shredded pine needles and oak leaves as fill) and gets turned more often - to keep aerobic content high, with molasses added to turned layers - to keep heat up. Fish carcasses make really high-nutrition compost.
The 'Critter Pile' is a 3-side cinderblock bin with 3/4" plywood front slats - to keep out live critters and minimize odor. Otherwise, possum, armadillo, coon and coyotes would regularly strew that pile over a 1/4 acre (we live out in the country on the edge of a saltwater bay estuary next to a large wetlands area). Fines from this pile (all turns for all piles are screened thru a chain-link gate to maximize gas exchange) are used mostly to inocculate new piles and making loam for raised-bed garden soil or tree plantings.