NOTI, Ore. – The call comes in the morning, after a cold, wet night, and David Heidt asks a few questions, writes down an address and climbs into his white truck-turned-horse-hearse.
He drives out to a farm, where he finds a horse lying on the ground, dead. Heidt picks up the horse with his crane and puts it in a red steel box on the back of the truck, and takes it back to his farm, where he buries it in a pasture at the end of a valley.
Heidt is an equine undertaker, operating one of just a handful of horse burial businesses nationwide.
Heidt, 42, said he never expected to find himself doing this work, which can be unpleasant and heart-wrenching. But he’s good at it, and he enjoys providing a service to people in their time of need.
“When I first started doing it, I thought the hardest part would be the gross issue,” he said. “It turns out a horse is a horse. The hardest part is the emotional part. Sometimes you cry – you can’t help it.”
Heidt and his wife, Marta, run Omega Farms, a 257-acre spread tucked into a valley surrounded by steep hills on the eastern edge of the Coast Range.
He’s providing a service for horse owners who can’t or won’t bury their horses on their own land.
He makes money off the enterprise, he said, but not a lot – he charges $225 for horses, less for smaller animals – and he said that’s not why he’s doing it.
“We offer it as a service, as an alternative,” he said. “We’re Christians; we run it as we would want to be treated.”
Heidt gets most of his business from referrals by equine veterinarians, who say they’re glad he took on the task.
“I think it’s a really good idea,” Eugene veterinarian Hank Anderson said. “That’s a big job.”
About three dozen operators offer similar horse burial services across the country, said Stephen Drown, executive director of the International Association of Pet Cemeteries &Crematories.
“I’m all for it,” said Drown, who has a horse farm in upstate New York. “I’ve never sent a horse to rendering and I never will. You want your horse who’s been your pet to go for dog food? I don’t. It should have a dignified burial or cremation of some kind.”
The Heidts got the idea to provide mortuary service for horses about two years ago when a horse Marta had owned for 27 years had to be euthanized. They buried it on their farm. Afterward, the Heidts asked Anderson, their vet, what other people do when their horses die.
“He said it’s a real problem,” Heidt said. “He said, ‘You guys ought to do this.’”
Heidt dismissed the idea at first, but then he and his wife started thinking more about it, and the logistics involved.
He bought a run-down 1976 International Loadstar 1700 truck and spent about $15,000 fixing it up. It’s equipped with a winch, knuckleboom crane and a big metal box, and he carries an ATV on the back with a towing sled in case the horse is in a location where he can’t get his truck.
Then there were the regulatory hurdles: He needed to get the OK from Lane County planners in the form of a special-use permit, which took about six months, and he needed a rendering license from the state Department of Agriculture just to transport horses in his truck.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
