BusinessReport.com

Eddie Poole answers the telephone. Someone is calling to report a dead dog on the side of Airline Highway.

Poole dispatches two men and a truck to find the dog. Sure enough, the dog is big, bloated and smells horrible. The men, wearing gloves and safety glasses, carefully collect the animal and deposit it in the truck.

Unceremoniously, the truck heads down the road, taking the latest ill-fated animal to the landfill.

“Somebody has to do it,” Poole says. “You leave all these dead animals in the road, they’re going to stink.”

Allied Waste Services is the city-parish government’s contractor for picking up road kill. On average, they receive four or five calls each day, mostly for dogs—lots of them—and cats.

Poole has worked for the company for 23 years. Before he was a supervisor, he was one of the people who helped with the pickups, even placing dead animals in his pickup truck if needed. Sometimes, it was emotional work.

“We’re supposed to take the collars off and call the owner to return the collar, but most of them seem to be strays and don’t have collars,” he says. “Sometimes people call about a missing dog, and they’re trying to find out if we picked it up.”

So far, he hasn’t seen one cat with a collar.

“Sometimes at a certain time of the year, it looks like a lot of them are killed and then it eases off,” Poole says. “Lately, we haven’t had a lot of calls. In October through November, it seems there are lots of calls.”

This is mainly a dog-and-cat business, but a recent phone call had an exotic ring to it. To Poole’s disbelief, the caller claimed there was a dead bobcat on Tucker Road, just off Plank Road. After handling “just regular animals” for so long, Poole went out to see if it was true. Sure enough, laying feet up in the remote countryside was a sizeable bobcat.

But aside from domestic fuzzy fatalities, the critter death toll also has included more wild fare such as armadillos, rabbits, raccoons and opossums—sometimes a deer.

“You’d be surprised,” Poole says of the various phone calls. “Even if they have a kitten in a bag, they’ll call to have it picked up.” Some have called about collecting dead squirrels.

And Allied Waste Services has to pick it up. The company accepts calls on a 24-hour basis and is contractually obligated to respond to a call within 24 hours, which it does in addition to collecting garbage, yard waste, debris and white goods Monday through Saturday. People call about retrieving a dead animal under a house, in a ditch or yard—but the company can’t collect it unless it’s on the street.

When the calls come about a horse or cow, Poole dispatches two workers and a boom truck for that job. They use the boom to hoist the animal into the truck, if it can be handled without falling apart, and it also gets a landfill burial.

Still, the job holds some surprises.

“I heard of a few live snakes in the garbage can, but I don’t know if anyone was playing a prank or not,” Poole says.

But clearly Poole’s favorite road kill story is about the one—a fox repeatedly crossing Airline Highway in the predawn hours—that got away. The fox might have been eating at a shopping center near there and, to his delight, he says it’s still dining there.

“He made it across the road. I saw it with my own eyes,” Poole says. “He’s a cute little ole rascal.”