Strong Feelings About Felines on the Prowl at Mobil Refinery : Wildlife: The company considers the feral cats a potential hazard around machinery. Four were taken to a shelter and destroyed, which set off a howl of protest from some employees.

They prowl the sprawling grounds of the Mobil Oil Corp. refinery in Torrance, a self-contained colony of stray cats.

There are calico cats and orange cats and black cats and “some big, mean, old, old cats,” said a refinery employee. “They’re beautiful.”

But for Mobil officials, the dozens of roving felines are fast becoming a public-relations headache.

This winter, the oil giant began an effort to trap and remove some of the cats, citing fears that they could wreak havoc with refinery machinery. Four cats were taken to a nearby shelter and euthanized.

Some Mobil employees objected, waging a petition campaign and seeking help from animal protection officials. The company has stopped the trapping, but to date no solution has been found. And the fate of an estimated 50 to 100 Mobil cats hangs in the balance.

The cats should be allowed to live undisturbed at the 750-acre Mobil refinery, argues Marilyn Poblasco, a Torrance resident active in animal protection issues.

“Killing the cats just doesn’t stand for what Mobil stands for,” said Poblasco, who wants to see the cats spayed or neutered and then moved to an area of the refinery away from dangerous equipment.

Mobil spokesman Barry Engelberg swiftly counters that his company never intended to kill the cats. “Our priority in this whole matter has been the welfare of the cats,” he said.

Safety concerns prompted Mobil’s decision to bring in Western Exterminator Co. to trap and remove the cats, Engelberg said.

Refinery officials fear that a cat could come in contact with the refinery’s high-voltage “switch gear”--a large version of a home circuit breaker--killing the cat and cutting off electricity to part of the refinery, he said. Engelberg said he has heard that cat droppings, bird remains and chicken bone remains have been found in the area of the switch gear.

While there is no record of any cat causing a power outage at the refinery, Engelberg said, the trapping was meant to prevent future problems.

When the cat-trapping program began, he said, its intention was to move all the cats to a nearby Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals shelter for adoption. But SPCA officials say that approach is flawed.

Most or all of the Mobil felines are wild, or feral, cats, without the domestic traits that make good pets, said Ed Cubrda, Los Angeles SPCA president, who met with Mobil representatives Tuesday.

“You don’t want people to be running to the shelter to save these cats’ lives,” Cubrda said. “Either the cat’s going to escape from them, or it’s going to do a lot of damage to their property, or to them.”

So the wild cats brought to the SPCA shelter in Hawthorne--like the four trapped at the refinery--are held for six days and then killed by lethal injection. Feral cats account for 50% to 60% of all cats handled by the agency’s Hawthorne shelter, Cubrda. Last year, the shelter accepted 6,389 cats and was forced to destroy 84% of them, he said.

The Mobil cats are illustrative of a larger problem, animal experts say--that of animal owners who abandon cats or kittens, allowing them to form burgeoning colonies in public parks, refineries or other areas. And many pet owners are reluctant to spay or neuter their cats.

“The bottom line is, society has created this mess,” Cubrda said.

“I can’t really put the blame on Mobil for what’s going on. The ultimate responsibility is that of the people who dumped the animals to begin with,” said Tori Matthews, assistant supervisor at the SPCA’s Hawthorne shelter.

So those cats--or, more likely, their descendants--formed a colony in the shadow of the massive towers and pipes at the Mobil refinery.

That colony is at least 6 or 7 years old, said a 15-year Mobil employee who has championed the cats’ cause and asked not to be identified by name because of fears of retribution by the company.

The employee said he actually prefers dogs to cats.

“I’m not really a ‘cat person,’ but I don’t like seeing them hurting animals,” he said. “I think (Mobil) has gone like on overkill. We’ve had these cats all this time, and all of a sudden we have a problem with them.”

Besides, he reported, the number of rats and mice has plummeted since the cats arrived. Before then, he recalled, “the mice were so bad, they’d get into our lockers. . . . The rats were nasty. They were big ones.”

After Mobil started its trapping program, the employee said, he helped launch a petition drive asking that the cats be allowed to stay on the property.

The employee reports that 175 Mobil workers signed the petition; Engelberg said he has only heard of a petition with 32 names.

Engelberg said he does not know exactly why Mobil halted the trapping. But he emphasized that Mobil conferred with the SPCA in hope of finding a solution. Perhaps the cats could be spayed or neutered and then moved to another site, he said.

However, some animal experts doubt the wisdom of relocating feral cats.

“It’s not a very practical solution. It’s just like passing the buck,” said Dr. Patrick Ryan, director of comparative medical and veterinary services for the Los Angeles County Health Department. “There aren’t any areas that want more cats.”

And if the Mobil cats are taken to the mountains and let loose, “there will be coyotes, and they will eat the cats,” said Dr. Josie Zabala, head veterinarian for Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control.

Meanwhile, the cats’ advocates point out that as Mobil tries to remove the cats, it is allowing four to six foxes to roam the refinery. But Engelberg responded that refinery officials have seen no signs that foxes have gone near the switch houses.

In the end, removing the cats might not solve Mobil’s problem, added the SPCA’s Cubrda. More feral cats in the Torrance area might simply take their place.

“You create a void,” Cubrda said. “You remove those cats--the new cats come in.” Asked about the possibility that cats might return to the refinery, Engelberg said: “That’s what they tell us. But we know we really cannot have the cats here.”