Gruesome stuff too! We did it all!

With this group I am showing two calls.

The top two photos are from a horse that was loose and ran out onto a highway in Phelan California. This is early in the morning just a little after sunrise in February 2004, and the accident happened while it was still dark. The driver was on his way to work and told the CHP that the horse ran out and he couldn't avoid it.
I didn't include the horse photos, no need really as you can see that it was hit by the headlight and then fell into the windshield.


The horse was shot by the CHP officer before Stacy had arrived to the call due to its injuries. Badly broken legs and internal injuries from the impact. The Ford wagon was said to be going at least 60 MPH, probably more than that too!
Happened so fast he had no real time to break and hit the horse.

I later arrived with the tilt bed trailer for large dead animals and took care of the horses body. I don't remember anymore if the owner was ever located or not.
If there was one found though, they'd have been looking at quite the cost for all the involved responses and reimbursements for the damage.



These last two photos are from a call that started for us at 2 in the morning a year later in February 2005 out near Hinkley California which is a little community North West from Barstow.
Seems that a large flock of sheep had broken out of their grazing area not far from these tracks and the herder had not stayed with the herd this night as he was supposed to.
Sheep being sheep, stay close together especially at night as it was then. The large herd moved around the area grazing as they went. They unfortunately for them found some good stuff to graze around and on both sides of the train tracks.
Now these are high speed tracks with the average speed of 60 to 70 MPH. A train just like this one came along in the dark and you can see what happened. But again, sheep being sheep, even with all this happening the remaining herd gathered back around the dead and injured sheep only to get hit again by two other fast freights. A lot of dead sheep.
I was the on-call Duty Supervisor that night and when I got the call from the Answering Service after they'd gotten it from the Railroad, I had the on-call officer from the Desert respond and had the San Bernardino valley officer called out to hook up the stock trailer and come on up!
Stacy and I arrived out there around 3:30 in the morning. It was hours longer for the valley ACO to get all the way up to our location as San Bernardino is about two hours from Barstow.
The CHP came out also since the sheep had also caused a couple of vehicle accidents on the nearby highway during the night when the sheep wandered on the highway on their way to the railroad tracks.
There were so many injured but still alive sheep the CHP was willing after they had their supervisor approve it, to start blasting the injured sheep to stop their suffering. Broken backs, smashed off legs, it was pretty sad.
None of us in Animal Control were equipped to handle and destroy a large amount of animals, especially large ones like sheep, to end their suffering.
It took awhile but the CHP officers, and with the ammunition we had, finally had all the injured sheep dead. Then it was the problem of so many dead sheep! By now it was regular day shift and I had our office call out the counties main rendering company, Stiles from Ontario California. Stiles had trucks all over the county that had contracts to pick up the large dead things like cows from the counties dairies.
The last photo shows the two Stiles trucks loading up the dead sheep. Their two large trucks were able to be filled up with all the over 120 sheep.
It was a lot of work for all of us, working to get the live sheep rounded up and all the dead sheep away from the tracks. The railroad wouldn't stop the trains so we had to be wary of those as they came trough too.
Another almost all night out on a call and a lot of call back money, but the call was taken care of and cleaned up less than 12 hours later.