Woman Sues Over Deaths of Her 2 Cats : Pets: The animals died in a fumigation tent. Their owner wants the exterminators to pay, but they deny blame and say $2,000 is a lot to ask.

When Arline Glasser saw the fumigation truck pull up to her next-door neighbor’s house in North Hollywood last January, she recalls running out in her bathrobe to tell the workers to make sure her cats weren’t around.

No cats here, Glasser remembers the workers telling her before lowering the termite fumigation tent and pumping it full of poisonous gas. But Glasser’s worst fears were realized the next day when the tent was lifted and two of her three cats were found dead inside.

Today, Glasser is scheduled to appear in small claims court in Van Nuys seeking $2,000--the maximum permissible under the law--from Michael R. Lindford, the president of the Long Beach pest control company.

Glasser said she filed the lawsuit to harass the company for its negligence and its insensitivity in dealing with the deaths of her pet Margaret, a 3-year-old white cat with charcoal-tipped ears, and the feral black cat that Glasser had been feeding and trying to tame for a year.

“My husband found them the minute the men took down the tents,” said Glasser, 46, who produces public service announcements for charitable organizations. “If I would have dreamed that they were under there, I would have ripped those tents apart. I would have had them down in two seconds.”

But company officials rebut Glasser’s story.

“We’re not out there to kill people’s pets,” said Clarence L. Real, operations manager of Division of Fumigation Inc., the fumigation company. “We really feel bad about it, but we had no idea the cats were under there.

“We offered to replace the cats for her with kittens or cats of the same age,” said Real, who is a cat owner. “She said she didn’t want to replace them, she wanted $500 apiece. That’s a pretty expensive cat. We told her we weren’t willing to go that high so she filed the suit.”

“These animals went up in value after death,” said Gwen Elliott, the company’s executive assistant.

Glasser admits that her neighbors warned her to keep the cats in her house because the fumigators were coming. But the wild cat never could be induced to come in, Glasser said. And although she locked Margaret in the house the night before the fumigators came, she let the cat out when it started jumping on her bed, aggravating her and her allergy to cats, she said.

Glasser said her bad luck with cats continued when her third cat was struck and killed by a neighbor’s car last month. Glasser has since adopted two more cats from the pound and has taken in another stray, she said.

In addition to filing the lawsuit, Glasser filed a formal complaint with the Agriculture Commission, a state agency that investigates complaints against fumigation companies. The commission absolved the company of blame.

The Structural Pest Control Board, which regulates pest control companies, occasionally gets reports of animals accidentally killed during the fumigation process, said Maureen Sharp, the board’s deputy registrar.

Either a cat will try to return to its home during a fumigation or a neighborhood cat will enter a house being fumigated, she said.

“The workers can’t stand there and make sure cats don’t get in or out of there for a two-day period,” Sharp said.

Glasser said her case caught the eye of the producers of the television show “People’s Court.” They invited her to appear on the show, which is filmed in Hollywood, promising to immediately pay the $2,000 if she won.

But Glasser declined. “I thought what good is that, I want the company to pay,” she said.