55 OSTRICHES DIE IN CLOSED TRUCK WHERE TEMPERATURES NEARED 200.

Byline: Associated Press 

Fifty-five ostriches died in a sweltering truck trailer during an aborted delivery from their desert farm to Los Angeles International Airport.

The shipment of 66 ostriches was bound for China but was refused at the Korean Airlines cargo terminal late Monday because several arrived dead, said the owner and airline employees.

The trucks were headed back to Hemet when inspectors stumbled onto the grisly cargo along Interstate 10 Tuesday afternoon. Workers at the Highway Patrol inspection station in Banning opened the two trucks' unventilated trailers to find temperatures inside nearing 200 degrees.

Some birds livened up after the nine crates were taken out of the trailers, authorities said. Patrol workers and humane officers sprayed water over the bodies.

In some boxes, dazed ostriches sat atop trampled bodies, plucked by other birds in apparent hysteria. Though 13 survived after being taken out of the trailers, two had to be destroyed. One had a broken neck and the other broken legs.

``I can't believe these people did this to these animals . . . I can't believe it,'' said inspector Gay McGuire.

``I think in stages they just went crazy and trampled . . . fell over, and kicked around,'' said Bill Bellamy, director of the Inland Empire Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. ``It was just turmoil . . . almost mindless hysteria.''

The birds left Hemet around 7 p.m. Monday for a Korean Airlines flight to China, said Jonathan Sun, owner of Da Da Ostrich Farms. The firm operates in San Francisco, Hemet and China, one of several new companies raising the birds for food and feathers.

Sun said Korean Airlines hired Air Container Transportation to move the ostriches. Shipment to the airport is the owner's responsibility, airline employees said Wednesday. They declined to comment on the record, however, saying they didn't know details.

A call to Air Container Transportation in El Segundo wasn't immediately returned.

Sun said the wrong trucks were sent to pick up the birds, but he sent them anyway when the drivers promised to leave the trailer doors open.

When they arrived at the airport with the dead birds, the airline would not take them, so they were held in a warehouse and sent back in the morning, he said.

The doors were closed when they arrived at the scales Tuesday. About $500,000 worth of ostriches died, Sun said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture requested a report and Bellamy said he would ask the Banning city attorney to review the case for possible forwarding to criminal authorities.

Three of the carcasses were taken by the USDA for testing to determine what killed them.