Beach Cats to Swap Rocky Life Style for High Desert Shelter

An animal-welfare activist has set the first traps in his campaign to remove the cats that for decades have lived in the beachfront rocks along the promenade outside Ventura’s Holiday Inn.

Leo Grillo, who runs a private cat shelter in the high desert near Acton, received an endorsement of the move from the state Parks and Recreation Department, which controls San Buenaventura State Beach. Grillo said the two dozen cats there--remnants of a colony that at one time numbered about 100--are sick or dying.

But both he and state officials believe the trapping will face severe opposition from several quarters. Animal lovers have long enjoyed watching the cats scamper along the rocks, and a small but devoted corps of volunteers has fed them daily. Previous attempts to interfere with what has become something of a Ventura institution have met with resistance.

“We’ve had reports of assaults on people trying to work out this problem,” said Steve Treanor, Ventura district superintendent for the state Parks and Recreation Department, adding that an elderly woman once pelted him with cat food when she mistakenly thought he was trying to run down a cat on his bicycle.

Joyce George, president of the Humane Society of Ventura County, cited “a very militant group” that has blocked trapping efforts. “We’ve had officers whose lives were threatened,” she said. “There have been so many agencies involved. Nobody really wants to get into it with these people.”

Grillo said onlookers hurled rocks at him and sabotaged his traps when he tried to organize a similar rescue a few years ago. But what he described as the cats’ deteriorating health makes the move necessary, he said.

Kathy Jenks, director of the Ventura County Department of Animal Regulation, agrees that the cats should go. She said her department, which is under contract with the city of Ventura, has not dealt extensively with the cats since city officials issued orders in 1981 to steer clear of them. However, she said, they constitute a public health menace in the making.

Each year, rabid bats are found at the nearby Ventura County fairgrounds and along the Ventura River, and “it’s just a matter of time,” she said, before the cat colony is infected. Many of the cats have upper-respiratory infections, she added, and a couple have died painfully after warming themselves on cold nights under the hoods of cars in a nearby parking garage.

For such reasons, state parks officials provided Grillo with a letter that he had requested, approving the move.

“It’s not good to have the cats out there,” Treanor said. “Those cats have a very low quality of life. They spread diseases among themselves. And when they die, they die in the rocks, creating a health hazard. It’s an artificially created situation, and we try to manage for the most natural conditions.”

On the Beachfront

By most accounts, cats have been abandoned on the beachfront rocks for as long as 25 years. Food and water would be set out for them by well-intentioned cat lovers, who inadvertently encouraged others to abandon cats in a place where they would receive some care, animal control officials said.

By 1980, the colony had grown so large that the city planned to trap the cats and turn them over to the Humane Society.

The plan was scrapped in the wake of a public outcry. The Humane Society was allowed to trap some cats and spay or neuter them and return them to the rocks. Society officials say a few had to be killed. The city’s policy since has been to let the cats alone, except when a health threat is apparent, said Carol Green, assistant to the city manager.

Just how apparent it is now might be a subject for debate.

“They ain’t sick,” said 90-year-old Florence Cardone, a stooped but feisty figure in a red hat who has hauled canned food to the cats on a metal cart almost every morning since 1976. “They live out their lives here pretty well.”

Also skeptical is Ralph Weigel, one of the 1980 plan’s most vocal opponents.

“I’m highly suspicious,” said Weigel, who quit the Humane Society’s board of directors to protest the 1980 trapping. “There must be so many cats closer to them that need attention. Why are they coming up here?”

“The cats are there of their own free will,” he added. “They’re not tied, they’re not fenced. They can live very safely in those rocks, as long as they have food and water.”

Weigel said he believes the cats are healthy. But he said he could support Grillo’s plan if it is proven to him that the cats are ill. “The time is coming when, in spite of anything you do, they’re going to get those cats out of there,” he said.

Angelo Borghi, another leader in the fight to keep the cats, said the animals are no more sickly than any population of house cats would be. He said a veterinarian, whom he would not identify, has checked them out and found only minor problems.

“I don’t know why this crap comes up every few years,” he said. “This guy has no business up here. Is he a vivisectionist or what?”

Borghi warned that hundreds of cats would be deliberately abandoned on the beach if the trapping persists.

Last week, Grillo set out five traps baited with antibiotic-laced cat food but failed to catch any cats. He hopes to devise a system using traps and nets and to round up half a dozen Ventura volunteers. The volunteers would not only help in the trapping of the timid animals, which is expected to last a month, but would also monitor the rocks afterward for additional strays.

“I’m offering an ideal solution,” he said. “They will live happily ever after.”

Kills No Animals

A former actor, Grillo runs three shelters for about 400 dogs and 200 cats under the auspices of DELTA (Dedication and Everlasting Love to Animals), a nonprofit group he founded in 1979. The animals are all pets that have been abandoned and have adapted to living on their own. Those that can’t be given to families live out their lives in the shelters; Grillo kills no animals and even runs what amounts to a hospice for cats with terminal diseases.

Grillo said the Ventura cats would occupy a room in a rural ranch house, complete with couches, air conditioning, fireplace, potbelly stove, studio and cathedral ceilings. The 150 cats in the shelter roam at will from room to room, lounging on cat furniture and romping with cat toys in the house and in the house’s fenced 3,000-square-foot yard. Grillo said he eventually would like to build a wing for beach cats and have the sounds of surf piped in to comfort them.

Grillo and DELTA, whose $750,000 annual budget is raised strictly through private donations, have received high praise from Los Angeles County animal authorities.

‘Spoiled Rotten’

“His animals are spoiled rotten,” said John Rozier, Castaic district supervisor for the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control. “They’re all fat and sassy. Food, water and litter boxes are plentiful. They’re all his personal loves.”

“People ought to be thinking about which is a better life for those cats in Ventura,” he said.

Grillo says much the same.

“Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing here if they’ve allowed the situation to degenerate this far,” he said. “These so-called animal-lovers have really screwed things up.”

Cats have gotten sick from canned food, which is not nutritious enough in the first place, spoiling in the summer sun, he said. Medicine he has offered the feeders has gone unused, and the cats have gone unvaccinated, he said.

A beach walk with Grillo is a grim stroll through what he conveys as a feline emergency room. He pointed out glazed eyes and mite-infested ears and hematomas that he said will blossom into raging infections.

‘Flea Anemia’

“See that tabby?,” he said. “She’s 6 months old, and she’ll die from flea anemia. She probably has 19% or 20% red blood cells now, and it should be twice that.

“See that black one on the end? He’s too sick to even eat. He’s probably got a kidney infection--you can tell by the way he walks, and look at that rapid breathing; that’s probably a temperature of 104.