re: Five day old bait left in ice chest.

Okay, I will grant this is not exactly the same as OP, but it's pretty related.

When I was growing up, Dad and his brother grew cattle, and about twice a year they would butcher some steers and each family would get a side of beef and sell the rest. Dad had a chest freezer he had gotten when his mother moved in with us. As he didn't have room for it inside the house, he put it on the porch, and the only way he could plug it in was to rig an adapter to the overhead light. He even put duct tape over the switch so nobody would accidentally turn the freezer off.

Unfortunately, the switch got turned off anyway, and nobody noticed for a couple of days. We had gone through about half of the beef, but the rest of it rotted. Man, what a smell.

Since, there was no way to empty the freezer without risking stinking up the porch forever, his final solution was to use one of his tractors to pull the freezer out. He then loaded it on a trailer and dumped it off in the woods he owned a couple of miles from anyone. Opened up the freezer and let nature take it's course (all of the beef was in butcher paper that was already rotting away.)

About a year later, his father-in-law went down to the freezer and took out the compressor to use for his own cold room.

Dad ended up buying another freezer, and more importantly, installing a dedicated plug for it.