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The City's Eight Road Warriors
Never Bring Them Back Alive;
By: JOHN M. GLIONNA
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Robert Hadnot considered the dead dog's body, examined its
thousand-yard stare and the teeth clenched in an eternal snarl.
"Looks like another homicide," he said.
With a sigh, Hadnot jumped from his truck and pointed to the telltale
tire tracks spun into the dusty shoulder of the Pacoima side street. He
gazed down at the hefty mixed-breed still wearing its tags and kicked the
dust: "Sorry big man, but somebody done you wrong."
Hadnot is a talkative man with a cow-catcher goatee, a former forest
service firefighter who now spends his days driving the streets of the
industrial east San Fernando Valley in search of things that make most
motorists wince and turn away.
He looks for road kills. He inspects them, pokes at them, sometimes
talks to them. And then, one by one, without fanfare, he carries them
away.
At 35, Hadnot is one of the city's eight dead animal collectors,
weighted with the thankless job of annually removing tens of thousands of
bloodied animal remains from city streets. Last year, he and co-collector
Curtis Fontenot disposed of 8,100 carcasses from the East Valley alone.
That averages two dozen bodies a day each, not counting their
twice-daily visits to local animal shelters. It's a cold cargo of dogs,
cats, possums, deer, coyotes, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, monkeys,
snakes, pigs, skunks. Even a gorilla.
Seven of 10 are domestic pets, luckless animals who made one last
ill-timed move onto some Tarmac thoroughfare. All are trucked to a
rendering plant in the bowels of Los Angeles where they are boiled into
ingredients for things like fertilizer and soap.
Hadnot knows his job commands little respect from the general
public--unless, of course, it's their pet he's carting away.
"This job is not important to people," he said, "so I make it important
to myself."
He sees himself as a canine coroner of sorts, an expert investigator
who questions the deaths no one else cares about. He talks in cop jargon,
refers to the animal corpses as his cases. He responds to calls about
anxious pets who have accidentally hanged themselves with their own
leashes, who have been mysteriously shot or beaten with 2-by-4s, animals
dumped at lonely locations in plastic garbage bags. Talking to himself,
he says things like: "This doesn't look right."
And then there are the road kills--not DOA (dead on arrival) but DOR
(dead on road).
Each morning, he arrives at his sanitation department garage in
Sunland and consults the daily dead animal report, which on a recent day
listed some one dozen victims, including a lamb, a goat, three dogs and a
question mark--an animal John Doe.
Two hours and a dozen stops later, his emerald green city truck begins
to reek of death. Hadnot sniffs the air: "This is nothing. Wait until
August."
Veteran road kill collectors trade war stories about the smell that
lingers in the brain, settles rudely onto the tongue, making some
trainees quit after only one day.
"If you could turn that stink into perfume, it would sell for $500 a
ounce, it's that potent," said supervisor and former dead animal
collector C. W. Perkins.
Motorists run red lights when they get a whiff of the collector
trucks. Steely-eyed motorcycle cops back off, return their ticket books
to their pockets. Said Perkins: "A pile of 2-day-old dead animals and a
skunk carcass will drive even the flies away."
At first, Perkins says, the job made him unable to eat ketchup or any
red food. Finally, it turned him into a vegetarian. "I picked up so many
road stiffs that looked like hamburger meat, that when I went to the meat
counter and looked at the real thing, I said to myself, 'Uh-uh. Never
again.' "
Veterans tell of the collector who removed so many dead animals that
he had nightmares about being chased by dogs. "Every morning," Perkins
said, "he woke up tired."
Others have encountered panicked possums who aren't quite dead,
venomous snakes with one last bite in them, cats sacrificed in ritual
killings. Then there was the dead 400-pound pig stuck in the mud and the
gorilla killed by a fall in its cage.
Worse, perhaps, are the distraught pet owners. Like the woman who
cried so violently, her angered husband finally said: "You won't even cry
that hard at my funeral!"
One weeping pet owner asked Perkins what would happen to her dog's
body. He gave no answer. "I didn't have the heart to tell her that I was
going to take her dog to the rendering plant where they would grind it
up, that she would probably be washing her face with her dog one day."
Time was, Vietnam veteran Fontenot could not comprehend the agony
suffered by grown men and women over some dead pet. But five years on the
job have taught him compassion.
"Now I find myself praying for these animals and their owners," he
said. "And when I pick up an animal, I always make a point to say 'I'm
sorry about your pet.' "
*
For his part, Hadnot shakes his head at unleashed pets allowed to run
the streets. Passing some smiley-faced dog running free, he mutters sadly
to himself, "I'll be back for you later."
But the worst part of his job are the visits to the animal shelter,
where he sometimes imagines that the ghosts of dead animals are waiting
for him along with the bodies.
On one recent visit, he tossed 40 carcasses from a holding cooler into
his truck, including the bodies of kittens he cradled in the palm of his
hand.
In one nearby cage sat a large dog ready to be put down. "He's a
biter, so nobody wants him," the attendant said, adding, "Kind of like
putting your grandmother to sleep because she yells at you. That's the
mentality."
big man.
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