Compulsive Collectors of Animals Stir Activist Issue

‘I can’t turn them away. I spend every dime I get on them. People think I’m nuts.’

William Long

Dedicated to animal rescue work.

The reaction was the same on both sides of the cage door Tuesday at the Castaic animal shelter. William Long was just as happy to see his two dogs as they were to see him.

Long owns 87 dogs that have been confiscated by authorities in a dispute between Long and the owner of a Saugus kennel he had rented for his pets. Long faces a Friday deadline to retrieve 60 of them in time to prevent them from being destroyed.

Long says he is trying to come up with the $4,000 he needs to bail the dogs out of Los Angeles County animal shelters where they have been housed since they were seized July 11. But shelter officials say Long does not have a suitable place to take the animals, even if he does come up with the $1-a-day boarding fee for each.

“I just hate to see dogs suffer,” said Long, 47, of Newhall. “I can’t turn them away. I spend every dime I get on them. People think I’m nuts.”

To animal activists and animal care professionals, Long is a “humaniac”--a person who has dedicated his life to personal, do-it-yourself animal-rescue work.

Problem Has Always Existed

Animal-control officials say such pet collectors have always been around, often without arousing anyone’s attention. But spreading urbanization has made it more difficult for them to maintain their makeshift kennels--even as a mushrooming population brings with it more unwanted and abandoned pets, according to authorities.

A raid last month by San Bernardino animal control officers turned up 84 dogs being kept at the home of an elderly woman. In the pack were scores of strays that at one time had lived in a defunct Sun Valley kennel.

That kennel had been rented by a Woodland Hills woman, who used it as a home for unwanted dogs until it was sold last year. The woman, Anita Less, rescued an estimated 5,000 dogs and cats over eight years before she left the state this summer, leaving about 100 dogs and cats scattered in kennels and at the San Bernardino residence.

Regina Eshelman, an Encino bookkeeper who helped find homes for dogs seized in the San Bernardino raid, said the animal rights movement is becoming polarized by the humaniacs issue.

Movement Has Extremes

“Some want to save every animal, to warehouse and stockpile them. Others are so jaded that they simply want to euthanise every animal they see,” Eshelman said.

“Some of the humaniacs are very responsible and have fund-raisers like garage sales to raise money for food, veterinary care and proper housing. But others keep dogs in two feet of feces. They have dogs eating other dead dogs, dogs going without food for a week.”

Jane Guttman, a Reseda animal activist who belongs to several animal rights groups, said humaniacs “come from a position of great compassion and concern. They’ve done it from their heart. It’s just that they got in over their head. They can’t say no.”

Guttman said she knows a North Valley woman over 80 years old who uses virtually all of her pension to feed about 50 cats. “I know another woman who picks up dogs at shopping centers. Humaniacs do what they do because they see a horrible problem and they don’t know what to do. So they take the animals in,” she said.

“Anita Less was a desperate rescue worker. She’d stand outside animal shelters and ask people to give her their dogs rather than turn them in. She’d follow them inside and pay to bail the animals out rather than leave them in a shelter that sells to medical research.”

City and county animal-regulation officials said pets belonging to Long and to Less were well cared for. But that is not always the case with humaniacs’ animals.

“They’re well-intentioned people. I never met one that wasn’t,” said Robert Rush, general manager of the city’s Animal Regulation Department. “But they start out with one animal and it builds. I’ve seen them turn a house into a literal cesspool. The filth and disease that come with it can be a terrible thing. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.”

Horror Stories Recalled

Rush said the worst conditions he has seen involved 125 cats kept in a Sepulveda home a few years ago. Gary Olsen, director of the city’s East Valley Shelter in North Hollywood, said a Canoga Park incident is the most disturbing he remembers.

“A woman out there had between 50 and 75 cats. When they’d die, she’d put them in the refrigerator. We were finally called by neighbors,” said Olsen, who has 16 years experience in animal regulation.

“These people try so hard to help animals that they don’t even eat. They spend everything they have on vets and on food and finally just on food. The animals get diseases and it gets worse and worse,” Olsen said.

Brian Berger, director of the county’s Department of Animal Care and Control, said his staff is “regularly put in the position of having to rescue animals from people who started out with the best intentions.

Humaniacs the ‘Extreme’

“The humaniacs, to me, represent the extreme. They are making a judgment that they are the only people qualified to take care of animals.”

Berger recalls a Bellflower woman with 81 cats who was sleeping in her front yard because of the feces and dead cats in her house.

Berger’s six county shelters took in 92,000 animals of all sorts last year. Although many have been collected by animal control officers--the proverbial “dog catchers”--40% are brought in by their owners to be destroyed, according to Berger. But the county also returned 6,000 lost animals to their owners and found new homes for 18,000.

Of the 47,269 dogs impounded last year by the city’s six shelters, 5,434 were reclaimed by their owners and 10,049 were placed in new homes, according to city officials.

Unclaimed Animals Killed

Animals not claimed at both the city and county shelters were destroyed, although the county sold about 1,200 for medical research. The city does not supply animals for research.

Animal activists oppose use of strays for research. But they are split over the routine destruction of unwanted pets.

“Some believe you should keep everything alive, regardless of the circumstances. Others feel you should place as many animals as you can in good homes and euthanise the others,” said Betty Cardoni, director of Mercy Crusade, a 6,000-member, Van Nuys-based group that supports spay-and-neuter programs and investigations of animal cruelty.

Cardoni said her group is called constantly by animal owners such as Newhall’s Long who have become overwhelmed with their personal rescue programs.

“I can understand his predicament. It’s very hard to turn your back on an animal. But I can offer him very little hope. Money can be arranged, but to find a place to keep 84 animals is very, very difficult.

‘Happens All the Time’

“It’s heartbreaking,” Cardoni said. “But it happens all the time.”

Long, who says he does kennel work to support himself and his animals, collects the dogs he finds by the side of the road or from people who seek him out. “I don’t go looking for them. They just come in my path.”

He gives each a name and has no trouble distinguishing one from another.

Before he moved to Newhall, he rented space on a ranch in Chatsworth for the animals, he said. He then used the Saugus kennel, but was evicted when the owner raised the rent and he could not pay it. The dogs were confiscated by the county under a court order.

At the Castaic shelter Tuesday, Long seemed optimistic. He said he hopes to move his dogs to the desert community of Lucerne Valley or to property off San Francisquito Canyon Road outside Saugus.

“I’ve had 13,622 dogs in my life. I’ve kept track,” Long said. “I keep them all myself because there are very few good homes for them.”