Nuts About Pets : Rescuing Stray Animals Can Turn Into a Dog’s Life

One day about five years ago, Pitsa Vidiakitis noticed a pack of 16 wild cats hanging out near the carport of an apartment complex near her home in Hollywood.

She began feeding the animals. Then she began trapping them. Vidiakitis always carries a trap in her ’75 Vega, along with a cat carrier, dog food, cat food, leashes, collars and tags. She took the cats to clinics to be spayed or neutered.

And then, to the disgust of that apartment complex’s residents, she brought the cats back there and continued to take them food.

“I said, ‘Look, I’m alleviating your problem--they won’t have any more litters,’ ” Vidiakitis said, still hurt by the residents’ reaction. “But they kept throwing away my (feeding) dishes.”

Eventually, the manager of the apartment complex threw her off the premises. But to this day, the cats that remain are fed. Twice a month, Vidiakitis delivers cat food to a sympathetic resident.

In the eyes of the animal-welfare movement, people like Vidiakitis are the shock troops whose quiet devotion fuels the hope that “we all have a spark of compassion in us,” said Cleveland Amory, founder and president of the Fund for Animals, a national animal-protection group.

They seem to be unable to pass a stray dog or cat, and spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars, a year to board them. In an attempt to solicit new owners, they run newspaper ads, make phone calls and comb the ranks of fellow bleeding hearts.

Once in a while the more eccentric of their numbers makes news--the Castaic man who was boarding 87 dogs in various county animal shelters, or the West Los Angeles apartment building owner who rented only to pet owners. In response, the general public usually yawns with disdain or derision.

“The people who feel like me are in the minority and we’re known as fanatics and crazy people,” said Vidiakitis, a short, attractive, 43-year-old medical receptionist whose intensity is reflected by moods of perkiness and nervousness. “We’re known as nuts.”

This is one nut’s story.

Vidiakitis works afternoons and evenings as the receptionist in a small weight-reduction clinic on the second floor of a run-down La Brea Avenue shopping center. The clinic is run by Dr. Eugene Natale, a distant relative.

When Vidiakitis began working there, she took the liberty of placing some animal adoption materials on her desk next to the doctor’s business cards--a donation can for Pet Hope, the tax-deductible organization she formed three years ago; pictures of animals available for adoption; reward posters; collars and bumper stickers. Soon the entire desk was awash with animal welfare items.

Hoping to stem the tide, Natale purchased a wooden bookcase and told Vidiakitis to restrict her materials to it.

It didn’t work. Today every inch of the bookcase and the desk are jammed with paraphernalia, and the doctor’s office looks more like a veterinarian’s. There is even a tray full of animal-themed gifts for sale. Some of Natale’s patients have adopted dogs through Vidiakitis. Some bring their dogs with them to their appointments.

Complimented for his indulgence, Natale bends slightly, places an arm behind his back, wrenches it, feigns pain and says, “She talked me into it.”

Most of Vidiakitis’ free time is spent on the phone in a room of her apartment. Bulletin boards are festooned with scores of snapshots of animals she has placed or owned. Like a harried matchmaker, she works with other animal placement agencies and volunteers, including those who try to find homes for specific breeds of lost dogs. Most of these volunteers know each other and form a loose network; Vidiakitis said that she personally knows at least a dozen other people who do the same kind of independent work she does.

At the moment, she is paying kennels to house four stray cats and three stray dogs that she has picked up. In addition to working the phone, she tries new tricks. Instead of running an ad for an older dog in the usual classified ad column, she notices that one Los Angeles newspaper has a “senior life style” column and decides that she’ll run her ad there, saying the old dog is “looking for a friend.”

Between the boarding fees and food and medical expenses and newspaper ads, she figures, she spends $5,000 a year, with donations for each adoption accounting for only a small part of her costs. She finances her efforts, she said, through lavish use of credit cards.

“I can’t control myself,” she said. “If I see one that’s loose or injured, I have to stop. It hits me in the stomach. I’m scared to go in the car. I actually go a certain route every day thinking, ‘Dear God, gimme a break today, please don’t let me see anything.’ That’s the point I’m at now.”

She is, on one hand, desperate to find homes and, on the other, anxious about making a placement mistake. “I do this the way you’d handle the adoption of a baby.”

Take the guy who called last month about adopting an abandoned cat that Vidiakitis had picked up after its owners moved away.

“He wants to adopt Orange Juice, and he sounded OK over the phone but he’s just out here from Oklahoma so I can’t do what I usually do, which is to see if he has a regular vet and call for a reference. He could be a potential seller (to laboratories that experiment on animals). Everybody to me is a potential something until I prove otherwise.”

Since she formed Pet Hope, Vidiakitis has found homes for 222 dogs and cats. She has a file on each one, often with a picture. She requires the adopter to sign a contract. There are rules: Cats must be kept indoors. (“Otherwise you call back and they’re dead--a coyote got them or they’re poisoned. I can’t deal with that anymore.”) Dogs must be protected by fences. Owners must notify her if they move.

Vidiakitis will call often after an adoption to make sure that all is well. Sometimes it’s not. Last spring she went to small claims court in an effort to enforce another provision of her contract--that an adopted pet cannot be given to another family, and instead must be returned to her.

She lost. A judge told her, not surprisingly, that once adopted, the animal was a possession beyond her grasp.

“That was a real bad day for me,” she said. “Things have to change. In the case of that dog, when we found her her ribs were showing. We took her to the pound--we have to do that first, legally--and then bailed her out, took her to our vet, got her built up nutrition-wise, spayed, dewormed. The boarding facilities, the tags, the ads--that dog was $750. And do you know that the people who adopted the dog did not give me a donation? The judge said none of that mattered.”

There is a social cost to this obsession.

“Everybody I know as a friend is like me,” she said simply and without apparent regret. “I’ve eliminated everybody else.

“My father just passed away at 90. He’s a cantankerous man and a love but he never could quite understand me. It would always be, ‘When are you gonna get married; what are you gonna do with all those animals?’ He was from Greece and there, an animal’s an animal. ‘Til the day he died I don’t think he understood me. He’d say, ‘I feel sorry for you. You’re going to be alone,’ but he didn’t realize I’m not alone. I don’t feel alone. I’ve got my friends and my company (the cats that live with her).

“I don’t go shopping at I. Magnin anymore. I don’t have my hair done, I don’t pay $50 to have my hair dyed, I use Preference by L’Oreal. I don’t do things like I used to to pamper myself because I don’t think there’s any reason to do it. I think it’s more needed for the animals.”

And yet. . . .

“Guys don’t want to go out with you. I met this really nice, cute guy in the market and he was helping me put the groceries in my car and he sees all the cat food and that was it. You can’t even tell a guy you’ve got one cat. I could say I’m divorced and have six kids, I don’t think it would bother them, but you tell them you have a pet and they go nuts.”

She has, from the time she was a little girl in Canton, Ohio, been in love with cats, she said, pulling out a little black-and-white picture of herself as a toddler with an early pet. “I started picking them up and bringing them home.”

After she grew up, she moved to New York, got involved with animal rescue groups and began to board strays on her own after moving to Southern California in 1979.

“Some people say it’s a substitution because I’m not married and don’t have children. Some people say, ‘Why don’t you take that time for humans?’ They don’t understand--it all comes together. If I saw a person on the street injured or wandering lost, I’d try to help them but my preference is toward animals because they’re helpless. . . . People just leave them on the steps of the house when they move and drive away. What do they think, they can fend for themselves?

“You can be a fanatic in religion, you can be a fanatic in buying clothes, you can be a fanatic in collecting movie star autographs--why, if you’re trying to make something better for something, someone, why can’t you be a fanatic about that?”

James Harris, an Oakland veterinarian who is chairman of the Human-Animal Bond Committee of the California Veterinary Medical Assn., said it is unfair to generalize about emotional traits that cause people to devote themselves to animals this way.

The gamut ranges from well-adjusted people for whom animals simply fill “a warm, special place” to “very dysfunctional people who say things like ‘people are no damn good, only animals count.’ In essence, this is a cry for help. In trying to save animals there is a poignant plea to try to save themselves,” Harris said.

Pitsa Vidiakitis has, on occasion, gotten disillusioned with the idea of trying to save every animal she sees.

“I call it the bottomless pit sometimes. You feel like you’ve done something, you’ve placed a pet and you say, ‘The monkey’s off my back for a few hours.’ And then the next day you’ll get a phone call or you’ll see something and you’re right back down. There’s a lot of not being able to eat and crying and stuff like that. You lose an animal, or they pass on.”

She begins to tell a story about the stray Doberman who was found giving birth to seven or eight puppies in front of a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. A friend got there, put the puppies in a car and drove them to a kennel.

“We put our hearts into that one, but they contacted parvo (a virus that attacks the intestinal tract) and they all died except for the mother and another pup. To see that, that was really sad.

“Most of the time you’re depressed. You don’t know why, but you wake up and you’re depressed. But when I wake up that way and don’t put my makeup on or get dressed, I can’t help the animals. If I’m not my usual self, a person won’t drop a quarter in the donation can. If I show it, I’m not doing any good. If I’m going to be depressed, I’m going to do it when you leave.

“I’ve tried to stop. I’ve said I’m not going to deal with this any more, and then people call me and you find out you can’t. Automatically you get involved. It’s like an addict or an alcoholic.”