SPCA tries saving Pa. shelter's cats

From New York to Indiana to Georgia, desperate animal-rescue groups regularly turned to the Tiger Ranch Cat Sanctuary near Pittsburgh and its promise of lifetime care for unwanted cats that likely would have been euthanized in overcrowded shelters.

In the last year, thousands of cats, some feral, many others once family pets, have been shipped hundreds of miles to what their rescuers thought was a safe haven.

But the reality, revealed in a nighttime raid led by the Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania SPCA last week, was anything but safe.

A 120-member team of shelter workers, police, veterinarians and volunteers descended on the property, 20 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, on Thursday night after a seven-month undercover investigation and found hundreds of sick and dying cats, 105 cat carcasses in freezers, and a fresh burial pit.

"What struck me was how young the cats were," Howard Nelson, chief executive officer of the Pennsylvania SPCA said yesterday after witnessing several autopsies. "They did not die natural deaths. They were coming in healthy, were exposed to horrific viruses, and died a horrific death."

Conditions were deplorable in a house and five outbuildings, crammed with scores of cats huddled around a portable heater with no clean water and a single food bowl, humane officials said.

Over the next 48 hours, about 400 cats, almost all suffering from life-threatening disease, were seized in what SPCA officials said might have been the state's largest anti-cruelty raid ever. Agents yesterday were trying to round up 250 to 300 cats still roaming the 29-acre property.

The sanctuary's owner, Linda Bruno, 46, also known as Lin Marie, was arrested and charged with 14 counts of animal cruelty. She was held in an Allegheny County jail after being unable to post the $50,000 bond. More cruelty charges are pending, authorities said.

Word of the raid spread quickly throughout the Mid-Atlantic and South as horrified rescue groups flooded the SPCA with e-mails and posted frantic notes on Internet message boards wondering what had happened to their animals and how to get them back.

"Many, many cats from Georgia went to Tiger Ranch," said Pat Dasenbrock, who works with cat-rescue groups in Atlanta. "A driver took cats by the van load - 50 or 60 of them there - twice a month."

They traveled the 700 miles to Pittsburgh because Georgia has a serious cat overpopulation problem, and many adoptable shelter cats end up in gas chambers, generally regarded as an inhumane method of euthanizing animals, Dasenbrock said.

"We felt so good about Linda," she said. "She told us she adopted 100 cats a weekend and that there was a long list of people waiting to adopt cats up there."

Rose Rosenbaum of Hillsborough, N.J., said she had taken eight rescued cats to Tiger Ranch last year and found a line of others waiting to surrender cats. She said she had seen a few cats with runny noses but thought the facility looked fine.

"We were surprisingly happy with what we saw," she said. "I wonder if it just got out of hand."

Bruno charged between $1 and $25 for every cat she took in, according to those who did business with her. There has not yet been a full accounting of her business.

Nelson said the public had not seen the worst sites on the property: the burial pits out back and an area an investigator called "the death room," where cats with untreated diseases languished, too weak to reach their food or water bowls.

Debi Romano, founder of the SaveKitty Foundation in New York, said she had sent 18 cats plucked from the streets to Tiger Ranch last year after talking to Bruno and hearing from fellow cat rescuers and from officials in shelter's community that cats were well cared for.

"I trusted their judgment," she said. "I live and breathe for my feral cats. I thought I was sending them to a better life."

The surviving cats are in an emergency medical center set up at the former Clarion County Humane Society about two hours away, where they are being treated for life-threatening conditions including respiratory infections, abscesses, dehydration and malnutrition. Between 30 and 35 cats have been euthanized, Nelson said.

With no records, an unknown number of cats that could be tracked via implanted microchips, and rescue groups scattered around the East, the SPCA faces a post-Hurricane Katrina-like effort to reunite cats with those who tried to save them.

Until they are surrendered by Bruno or she is convicted, the cats will have to remain at the Clarion County facility.