WORK IN PROGRESS : Pet Project : Lori Johnson takes care of cats, dogs, birds, even snakes, but she doesn’t do husbands.

Lori Johnson calls her business Lori’s Loving Pet Care Service, so right off we know she’s not a bail bondsman, say, or a cement contractor. Obviously she cares for pets. Lovingly.

Nevertheless, one day she said she received a telephone call from a woman who wanted her to care not for pets but for her husband.

“I’ll pay you double,” the woman offered.

Johnson was taken aback. “Is he handicapped?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, is there something wrong with him?”

“No, I just don’t trust him. I want you to check up on him.”

Leave a house key with Johnson while you travel, and she will feed and exercise your animals every day, clean up after them, give them their medication, take them to the groomer if you wish. She will bring in your mail and newspapers and water your house plants. She will even switch tapes in your VCR if you’ve programmed it to record while you’re away.

She does not, however, do husbands.

Before you scoff at a vocation that requires scooping up dog debris, consider that at age 23 Johnson runs her own business and single-handedly makes more money than do half the households in Ventura County.

Never mind that her client list reads like a roll call for the Federal Witness Protection Program: Weenie, Brutus, Bonnie and Clyde, Sylvester, Fritz, Hobie, Kona, Squeeker, Itchy, Scratchy. Most of Johnson’s charges are dogs and cats, but she also gets calls for birds, fish and the occasional snake. And then there was Thor.

Thor was a young mixed Labrador retriever, 125 pounds of panic. He knew Johnson, who had cared for him many times, and was always friendly to her. But one day something snapped in him and he pounced on Johnson as she was entering the garage to feed him. Young Thor just clamped his muscled jaws on a thigh and sank his teeth through flesh and artery. A neighbor beat the dog off with a bat, then threw him food over a fence for four days until his owners came home. Johnson emerged with stitches and a story, but she lost a customer: Thor got capital punishment.

Lori’s Loving Pet Care Service has five or six competitors in the area now, but in November, 1986, when Johnson--just out of high school--started her business, the field was wide open. The owner of a fledgling enterprise called Critter Sitters was relocating out of state and wanted several thousand dollars for her company’s name and client list. Johnson decided to instead start from scratch.

These days she carries a tangle of house keys more than a foot long, a would-be bonanza for burglars except that the keys are unidentified. While making her daily rounds, Johnson matches keys to locks by memory. It is a foolproof system most of the time, but occasionally memory fails and she has to work her way through the whole metallic mess, key by key.

A more common problem, aside from triggering security alarms (“I’ve gotten to know the cops of Oxnard well”), is discovering that a pet’s vacationing owner has cleverly locked a lock for which Johnson has no key. Johnson refers to “my locksmith” as if he were her personal physician. A dozen times he has gotten her into a house and out of a jam.

If you think anyone with a can opener and a pooper scooper could prosper in this profession, consider Johnson’s typical day: Up at 5 a.m. to tend to her own four dogs. On the road by 5:30. House calls until 9 or 10 a.m. Home for maybe two hours. A few midday house calls. A short break. Then continuous house calls from 2 p.m. until 8 p.m.

Cats are a quick stop because they don’t need to be walked. Dogs require 15 to 30 minutes. Johnson figures she can handle 30 homes per day maximum. During the Christmas vacation season she hits the road at three in the morning and goes almost nonstop until 9 at night.

It is a seven-days-a-week occupation, a requirement that doesn’t seem to faze Johnson. Last year she granted herself a total of two weekends of vacation.

“I’ve always had the goal of being well-to-do,” she says, punctuating the statement with a self-conscious laugh that characterizes many of her utterances. “It’s something my father put into my head.”

That she is driven shows in her driving. Despite restricting her business to Oxnard and Ventura, Johnson says she averages 150 miles a day in her 1992 Mazda pickup. On her busiest days she logs as many as 300 miles. And this woman doesn’t just drive, she drives as though she is competing in a car rally. By comparison pizza delivery drivers look tame. “That’s where I make up my time,” she explains.

At one point she had four traffic violations and two accidents on her driving record, an accomplishment the Department of Motor Vehicles viewed unenthusiastically. She has been better lately, but even at her worst, she adhered rigidly to at least one safety rule. “I don’t speed inside housing tracts,” she says. “That’s a no-no.”

Upon arriving at a customer’s residence, Johnson blows in, does her pet thing and blows out. The pets, for the most part, are predictable, so Johnson’s days tend toward the sort of routineness that most of us need to feel anchored in a spinning world. It is the deviations from routine that grant us fodder for talk.

Once Johnson let herself into a house only to find that it had been stripped clean of its contents. It proved to be the work of an angry husband in a messy divorce, expressing his views on property settlement.

Occasionally she walks into a house and discovers that the owners have shortened their vacation without notifying her.

“Usually it happens early in the morning,” she says, “and I’ll get some old guy coming down the stairs in his boxer shorts.”

That’s something you don’t encounter in the course of most jobs--a guy in boxer shorts. But how routine could life be for someone who spends each day walking into strangers’ homes?