Lion Kings : Royal Treatment for Rescued Big Cats Includes Rush to Build Housing

The big cats sleep in cramped cages and horse trailers, accustomed by now to screeching power saws and the acrid scent of acetylene torches just a few yards away.

Since 27 lions arrived last week at the Wildlife Waystation, a private haven for neglected animals in the hills of Little Tujunga Canyon, dozens of workers and scores of volunteers have converged upon the wooded site to help in one of the refuge’s most ambitious rescue missions: Veterinarians have tended to the cats, many of which remain ill or injured after coming from a poorly maintained shelter in Idaho. Workers have strung thousands of feet of chain-link fence. After sunset, construction continued by the glow of portable flood lamps.

Four compounds built for the new residents were finally completed Sunday. By the time the dust settled, the waystation had devoted countless man-hours and about $150,000 for building supplies, medication and slabs of meat delivered to hungry mouths by wheelbarrow.

“It’s very exciting,” said Martine Colette, the waystation’s founder and president. “But it’s a lot of labor. A ton of labor. The first four days, we slept only seven hours.”

On a recent afternoon, the strain began to show. As Colette bounded across the construction site, on a hillside above the haven’s shady sprawl of pens and cages, a call squawked over her walkie-talkie. There was a mix-up over ordering much-needed galvanized wire.

“Am I speaking English?” Colette snapped at a foreman. “Or is there some confusion here?”

Nearby, a lion sniffed amid the chaos, yawned and lay down.

Emergencies are common at the haven. By numbers alone, 27 new lions, this one hardly ranks as a record. There was a Christmas Day, several years ago, when Colette rescued 15,000 day-old chicks stranded at Los Angeles International Airport.

But, she says, “it takes a lot of chicks to make one lion.”

This latest ordeal began when a federal official called to inform Colette of a raid on the Idaho facility, where lions and “ligers”--a cross of lions and tigers--lived knee-deep in spoiled food and refuse. The cats ranged from cubs to 400-pound adults.

Waystation staff set out immediately with trucks and trailers. Driving day and night, they returned four days later to a host of volunteers who had been alerted by a flurry of telephone calls and media accounts of the rescue.

“Any situation like this, the people up here will come together,” said Jerry Gillaspie, one of the haven’s cadre of volunteers. “It’s that human nature thing when there is an emergency.”

Gillaspie, a computer programmer, found himself helping to carry an anesthetized lion to the veterinary building, then shoveling dirt at the construction site. He paused to glance at the adjacent cluster of temporary cages and trailers.

“There’s an urgency to get them out of there,” the longtime volunteer said.

The waystation opened in 1977 when Colette devoted her 160-acre ranch in the Angeles National Forest to neglected and abandoned animals. The daughter of a Belgian diplomat, she taught herself to be a wildlife expert.

On her property, which lies north along Little Tujunga Road beyond scattered stables, large cages were built for a variety of creatures. Two black bears live beside a cluster of insistently chattering macaws. Deer share their pen with turkeys, with a kangaroo as their neighbor. A 15-member staff and more than 200 full- and part-time volunteers tend to a menagerie whose population hovers around 1,000.

The animals are nurtured to health and, if possible, returned to the wild. When that is impossible, they are either kept or transferred to zoos.

During the early years, the waystation survived on meager funds. Colette eventually developed her army of volunteers and a worldwide reputation that, in turn, attracted donors from the entertainment and business worlds.

Fat times have brought controversy, though. In November, nearly half of the board of directors resigned in a dispute over an increase in money paid to Colette each month--$6,500 in salary and $4,500 for rent on her land. Responding to complaints, the state attorney general’s office launched an audit of the haven’s finances. Officials could not be reached for comment on the audit.

But such turmoil seemed distant this past week.

If there was a turning point in the struggle to accommodate the lions, it may have come Thursday afternoon. One of the lionesses had given birth, and her cub was doing well. Meanwhile, Rod Spackman, manager of an El Segundo oil refinery, prevailed upon his employer to lend the waystation several portable light towers.

“I came up here the other night and saw people working without a lot of light,” Spackman said. “We wanted to help.”

At this point, the fate of the lions resides with an Idaho judge who will decide whether the animals should be returned to the shelter in that state. If that happens, Colette’s new compounds will provide more room for the 70 or so cats already living at the Wildlife Waystation.

Colette, however, does not expect the court to return the cats. She passed around snapshots that she took in Idaho, showing decrepit shanties and filthy conditions.

“We’re doing the right thing here,” said Spackman, the oil company manager. “A labor of love.”