Feeding the Whole Kitty Caboodle : Animals: A grocery clerk who once had 130 cats now has 64. A rent increase may make their $950-a-month care too costly for her to afford.
It all started after Sharon Goloskie’s divorce.
In need of comfort, she got two cats. And then another. And another.
Within several years, she had gathered 130 felines, retrieving them from animal shelters, scooping them off city streets and accepting them from people attracted by her reputation in the neighborhood as the Cat Lady.
But the devotion reached new heights four years ago when the supermarket clerk lost her former house in Arleta after a lender foreclosed on the mortgage. Unable to find permanent housing, Goloskie moved all 130 cats to the Ranchito Cat Hotel in El Monte.
“I always figured there was room for one more,” she said, standing outside the former henhouse where she rents room for the cats. “It’s only in the last year, when I’ve started running out of money, that I’ve thought, ‘What have I done? I’m in over my head.’ ”
Her brood has since dwindled to 64. For four years, Goloskie has paid $400 a month to house her cats, commuting more than an hour each day to feed them, clean their cages and fluff their pillows.
Each month, Goloskie said, at least $950 of her $1,600 salary goes toward cat care. The animals gobble up 80 pounds of dry food and 100 pounds of canned food weekly. And then there’s the litter--350 pounds a week.
Goloskie said she never intended to form her own kitty commune. But she found solace in the pets after her divorce 16 years ago. “I needed something,” she said. “Animals are so loving and they ask so little in return.”
Goloskie, 37, projects a down-to-earth charm, brightening even more when she discusses the latest adventures of her 64 feline friends. She can recite a detailed personal history of each animal--”That’s Priscilla; she was born with a crook in her tail”--but she founders when trying to recall dates or events, such as when her cat collection hit 130 or when animal control officers told her that she had 127 too many.
It all started when a co-worker gave her two cats. She later started volunteering at Pet Rescue Assn., answering telephones and cleaning cages for the nonprofit group. Pet Rescue, based in Sun Valley, finds new homes for pets given up by their owners for adoption.
Sometimes when the center’s cages were full, Goloskie said, she would tell callers that she would care for the cats herself so they would not end up in a city shelter, where they might be put to sleep. Some she placed in new homes; others stayed on. Meanwhile, she was trapping wild cats and taking in abandoned ones.
“It snowballed from there,” she said.
Some praise Goloskie’s efforts. “She is one of the unsung heroines, the Mother Teresa of the cat world,” said Candy Wanderer, 58, a supermarket customer who has known Goloskie two years.
But Annette Petelle, president of Pet Rescue, called Goloskie’s situation an obsession that went out of control. Goloskie’s actions endangered some cats, she said.
Some of Goloskie’s animals developed feline leukemia, a contagious fatal virus, Petelle said. Petelle said Goloskie told her that some of the cats she adopted from Pet Rescue died of leukemia.
“It became really a sad situation. So many of her cats were sick,” Petelle said. “She knew she had that situation but she continued and continued and continued.”
Indeed, Petelle said the association sometimes did not know when Goloskie was agreeing to take callers’ cats. Eventually, Goloskie stopped volunteering at Pet Rescue a few years ago.
Goloskie acknowledged that some of her cats died of leukemia, but said they fell ill long after she worked with the rescue association. Goloskie also said she separated the animals to control the disease and now vaccinates them against the virus.
At the height of Goloskie’s feline frenzy, all 130 cats roamed the 1,500-square-foot Arleta house she shared with her boyfriend. Cats swung from her drapes, slept in her bed and ate on her table.
“You could see them everywhere,” said former neighbor Marilynn Zuzek, who remembers Goloskie as the Cat Lady. “They were in the windows, the yard, everywhere.”
But the accompanying accumulations of fur, dirt and odor never swayed Goloskie from her mission. “I would look in their little eyes and they would look at me and I’d say, ‘I saved their lives. If it weren’t for me, they would be dead.’ ”
Around 1983, Goloskie boarded her cats after city officials ordered her to get rid of the animals. Goloskie said a neighbor complained to the city because the cats looked longingly at the neighbor’s aviary.
Goloskie admitted that she later brought the cats home--defying the city order--and returned them to the kennel only after she lost her house.
Goloskie said she now shuttles between the North Hollywood residences of her mother and present boyfriend, unable to afford rent after spending so much on the cats.
On a recent morning, a chorus of high-pitched meows greeted Goloskie as she entered the building where her cats live in large cages with outdoor runs. As she changed litter and swept the floors, cats strolled the corridor between cages, some taking languid baths in patches of sunlight, others nuzzling Goloskie’s legs.
“Oh, I love you, Polly,” Goloskie crooned to a black short-haired cat. Each cat--whether kitten or tom, solid or mottled, long-haired or short--has a name. The 1 1/2-year-old gray shorthair who escapes from cages is Houdini. An orange and white tabby is Sunny.
Goloskie recently learned that her monthly rent might rise $200, throwing into question how she will continue caring for her “kids.” She’s not sure what she’ll do now.
In the past, she has given some cats away, but adoptions make her worry that the cats might be sold for medical research, used for ritualistic sacrifices or treated poorly.
But, she said, she would adopt them out if she found good homes. She is also looking for new accommodations. But whatever the cost, she won’t desert the cats.
“I would take two or three jobs,” she said, “to support them.”
