Activists Angry Over Fate of Cats

A national animal rights group is blaming Boeing Co. in Seal Beach for the disappearance--and possibly the deaths--of a colony of stray cats that company employees had been caring for.

“My question to Boeing and the world is, ‘Where are the cats?’ ” said Bill Dyer, spokesman for In Defense of Animals, an animal protection organization based in Northern California. “I’m trying to get to the truth of it. If they did kill them, I want the public to know that this company kills animals, which is illegal.”

A Boeing spokesman confirmed Tuesday that the company had the cats removed but denied causing them any harm.

The controversy has its roots in a 1995 agreement between Boeing and a group of employees who adopted five stray cats living at the Seal Beach plant. If the employees would have the animals spayed and neutered, the company wrote in an internal memo dated Feb. 2 that year, the cats “may be returned to this facility to live out the remainder of their lives.”

“A lot of people were really happy about it,” said Faith Summerson, a 34-year Boeing employee who worked in Seal Beach at the time and helped care for the strays. “There were people who, every morning, would bring in a little food.”

That arrangement continued until last week, when Debbie Foster, another Boeing cat care-giver, noticed that something was amiss. “I walked by the main gate where a couple of the cats hang out,” she said, “and noticed animal traps set out there.”

Company spokesman Erik Simonsen said the traps were set by an Irvine pest-control firm hired by Boeing to remove the cats after complaints from some employees about odors and excess cat food left on the sidewalk. “Based on this information,” he said, “our facilities people had to react according to their rules to have an environmentally safe work area for employees. They were not aware of the agreement,” made under previous management.

Though the contract with the pest control company called for the cats to be taken to the nearby Huntington Beach Animal Shelter, Simonsen said, the company later learned that the animals had instead been released at Peters Canyon Regional Park in Orange.

A spokesman for Admiral Pest Control, which removed the cats, confirmed that they had been released into the wild but could not say exactly where. “The problem is that none of the animal control people want wild cats,” Brian Jones said. “What basically happens is that the cats are removed, and we take them to an outlying part of Orange County and let them go. No harm ever comes to the cats.”

The animal lovers beg to differ. “Peters Canyon is a 350-acre park,” said Summerson, who now works for Boeing in Long Beach. “There are coyotes and foxes and all kinds of stuff. If you put the cats in there, they would either starve to death or the coyotes would eat them.”