Animal Hearse

The partially decomposed corpse of the gray-and-white cat lies in the backyard of an empty house. Dead at least a week, its stench had finally persuaded the elderly couple next door to call the city for assistance.

Wearing thick rubber gloves and a drab green outfit with his last name on the right breast pocket, Robert Hadnot approaches the body. Without hesitation, he picks up the carcass and deposits it in a blue plastic bag. “Another one for the collection,” Hadnot shrugs as he marches back to his truck, unhooks a latch and coolly tosses the stiff body into a green metal container along with the rest of the day’s haul: four other cats, five dogs, two squirrels and an opossum, all destined for a rendering plant in Vernon.

Hadnot, a Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation employee, repeats the procedure about 20 times each day. For the past nine years the ebullient 38-year-old has worked Dead Animal Pickup, driving across the East Valley to fetch deceased dogs, cats and other unfortunate creatures. Dead Animal Pickup operates 365 days a year, and about seven drivers each day respond to citizen calls, says Paul Blount, a Bureau of Sanitation manager. Mostly the calls are for dead pets, but there are also the strays and wild animals that never make it to the other side of the road.

Hadnot says cats, followed by dogs, most frequently occupy the space in the back of his 8,400-pound truck. He’s also fetched dead deer, coyotes, skunks, a 90-pound albino Burmese python, a field mouse and a monkey. Blount adds that the Dead Animal Pickup staff has handled goats and sheep, seals, sea lions and sharks washed up on the beach. One time the Valley yielded a deceased pet llama.

As Bureau of Sanitation employees, Hadnot and his fellow men-in-gloves can all operate regular garbage trucks. But they receive special training in dead-animal mechanics, including how to winch carcasses heavier than 50 pounds. Serious people skills are also emphasized.

“We want somebody understanding and compassionate,” Blount says. “After a time, these people’s pets are like family members.”

Indeed, a day with Hadnot reveals more than one distraught pet owner who prefers not to watch the last act. Hadnot has seen everything from flowers on dead dogs to a woman who murmured goodbye to her pet pig as it lay in the truck.

Hadnot remains unfazed in the face of gruesome death, an emotional distancing that can be attributed to a youth spent on a hog farm. Or, he says as he shovels up a cat that tangoed with a car, “It may affect the cat, but it doesn’t affect me.”