A Roar for Help : Animal Refuge Gives Royal Treatment to Newly Arrived Kings of Beasts

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 above Lake View Terrace, dozens of workers and scores of volunteers have converged upon this wooded refuge to accommodate one of its most ambitious rescue missions.

Veterinarians have tended to the cats, many of whom remain ill or injured after transferring 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 being built for the new residents are scheduled for completion early this week. By the time the dust settles, the Waystation will have devoted countless hours and an estimated $150,000 for building supplies, medication and slabs of meat delivered 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 galvanized wire.

“Am I speaking English?” Colette snapped at one of her foremen. “Or is there some confusion here?”

Nearby, a lion sniffed at the chaos all around. He yawned and laid down.

Emergencies are common at the haven. And, by numbers alone, 27 new lions 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.”

The latest ordeal began last week, 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 around the clock, they returned four days later to a host of volunteers who had been alerted by a flurry of phone 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 a tranquilized 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.

This has been a year of urgency at the Waystation.

The facility 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 insistently chattering macaws. Deer share their pen with turkeys, and their neighbor is a kangaroo.

A 15-member staff and more than 200 full- and part-time volunteers tend to a menagerie whose population hovers at around 1,000.

The animals are nurtured back to health and, if possible, returned to the wild. When that is impossible, they are either kept or transferred to zoos. There has never been a documented escape.

“We don’t allow that sort of thing,” Colette quipped.

During its early years, the Waystation survived on meager funds. Colette eventually wooed an army of volunteers and earned 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 the monthly sum paid to Colette--$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 facility’s finances. Officials could not be reached for comment on the audit.

But such turmoil seemed distant this week.

If there was a turning point in the quest 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.”

As an unexpected bonus, the flatbed truck on which he brought the lights was equipped with a crane. Colette quickly put it to use, hanging I-beams along the tops of the new compounds.

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. If that happens, the new compounds will provide even 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 wooden shanties and filthy conditions.

And she was glad to see a handful of young women come walking up the path from the front gate around dusk.

“Here are the girls!” she exclaimed. “We get all kinds of people stopping by after work to help all night.”

The volunteers were hurried off to paint wooden dens being built for the compounds. Spackman, the oil company manager, smiled.

“We’re doing the right thing here,” he said. “A labor of love.”