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Misfit Pets Save Selves on TV Show

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

They walked onto the set a pack of misfits and unwanteds in need of a stiff hairbrush and a can of doggie deodorant, but they took to the camera like Garbo.

It may have been one man’s idea to build a local cable television show around unwanted pets at the Long Beach Animal Shelter, but it is animal magnetism that has made “The Pet Place” a raging success.

Adoptions at the shelter--where 10 to 40 abandoned dogs and cats were being destroyed daily--have soared since the first show was aired in April, said John Gonzales, senior animal control officer.

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The cable talk show lets pets make their own silent plea for a home, giving them a minute or so on camera while host Fred Bergendorff and Gonzales offer squeaky toys and a description. The rest of the show brings on experts to discuss everything from pet first aid to fleas.

In the first nine days after the show debuted on Simmons Cable Channel 3, the shelter’s adoption rate shot up 63%, Gonzales said.

Of 75 pets who had their minute in the spotlight, all but one were adopted. A few came down with illnesses and had to be put to sleep, Gonzales said.

The one leftover--a mixed-breed pup--was brought back for a second appearance and is waiting for a taker, said Bergendorff, a radio marketing executive and lifelong animal lover who created the show.

Shelter officials estimate that another 60 pets have been adopted by people who came in looking for an animal they saw on television and, finding that it had already been claimed, took home something else.

That is precisely the way 20-year-old Sayge Drotar of Belmont Shore found Bam-Bam.

Drotar stumbled on “The Pet Place” one day while changing television channels and was taken by a long-haired gray cat. When she went to adopt it, she was told it had been destroyed that morning due to an illness.

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“I was devastated. I wasn’t even planning on getting a pet and this little cat was so nice, I just had to have her. I was so depressed when they told me. I didn’t think I could make another choice.”

Then she spotted a gray and white kitten, just weeks old.

“He’s nice and healthy and he’s sitting right here next to me,” Drotar said. “It’s better to save one than none at all.”

Saturdays, the day most of the animals on the show become available for adoption, have gotten so busy that animal control officers have had to start their day an hour earlier to prepare for the rush, Gonzales said.

“The show is finding homes for animals we would otherwise be forced to put to sleep. We are even finding homes for the older dogs,” Gonzales said. “It’s fantastic.”

Meanwhile, The Pet Place show has been picked up by cable companies in Lakewood and Torrance, doubling the original viewing audience to 150,000. The viewing schedule in Long Beach has been stepped up from four days a week to daily, said Ken Mason, the show’s producer.

A fourth cable company has expressed an interest in using the show, and Mason is working on tailoring it to various communities by substituting the Long Beach animals with those from each town’s local shelter.

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Bergendorff hopes further expansion will reduce the millions of pets put to death around the country every year.

“Any further exposure will help save the lives of additional pets. Who knows where it will end?” Bergendorff said.

Locally, the show is already more than he imagined the day he went searching for a stray cat and saw the packed cages of the Long Beach shelter, where 8,395 animals were put to death last year for lack of a home.

“It’s hard to explain the feeling when you get to hold them and see them and know you can help them find homes,” Bergendorff said. “It’s unbelievable.”

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