Rivals, Activists Assail Hauler of Large Carcasses
By MATT MYERHOFF
Staff Reporter
Unlike goldfish, some dead pets can’t be flushed down the toilet. Burying a horse under a tree on your ranch is punishable by a $5,000 fine or six months in jail.
That’s where John and Shelley De Vries come in. Their De Vries Dead Stock Disposal Service in Artesia is licensed by the state Department of Agriculture to haul the carcasses of large animals that live on the area’s ranches, farms and homes zoned for livestock in Los Angeles County.
“You run into something different every day doing this,” said John De Vries. “People don’t expect horses to die, so they keep them in all sorts of weird places.”
John De Vries inherited the business from his father, a former engineer for Chrysler Corp. who saw an economic opportunity and started hauling dead animals in 1960 when the area was a center of dairy production.
“Now (the dairies) have all moved up to Chino,” he said. “Every once in a while, we pick up a cow, but it’s almost exclusively horses, and a couple of goats or sheep.”
The De Vrieses say they are certainly not getting rich off the venture.
On some pickups, De Vries charges as little as $100, plus the $40 fee to be paid to the rendering plant upon delivery. More complicated pickups involving long-distance transport may cost more than $1,000.
The business has no office, bookkeeper, warehouse or fleet just a truck and an answering service that pages them anywhere from once a month to five times a week for pickups.
To make ends meet, De Vries also works as a diesel mechanic.
Despite that and the hard, off-putting nature of the work, the De Vrieses have plenty of competition from the handful of other animal haulers in the L.A. area.
They won’t say how much they charge Santa Anita Racetrack and Hollywood Park, with whom they have done business for nearly 15 years, for fear their competitors will offer the same service for less.
“There are people who think it’s easy money what we do,” Shelley De Vries said. “It’s pretty easy to get a license. It costs a hundred bucks a year. You just apply and they inspect your equipment. We’ve had people recently try to undercut our prices.”
The California State Race Horse Commission requires that a state veterinarian perform an autopsy on any racehorse euthanized due to injury or illness. The autopsy is aimed at detecting illegal doping or sabotage.
That means when the call comes from one of the local tracks, De Vries hauls the body to San Bernardino, where the state’s lone veterinary school, UC Davis, operates the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory.
The De Vrieses have gotten used to being the bearers of bad news. “When we go to a stable, no one likes to see our truck,” Shelley De Vries said. “They call us the undertakers. We’ve been around so long, they know what our truck looks like. We’ve been harassed by animal rights groups, people who protest horses being euthanized and stuff. But it’s not our decision to do it, we just pick up the body. That’s one reason we don’t have a sign on our truck.”
