Left out in the cold
Someone dumped 14 plastic tubs containing cats outside a feline sanctuary in Central California.
Fourteen plastic tubs containing a multitude of cats — some of which were pregnant — were dumped outside a popular feline sanctuary in Central California early Thursday morning.
Workers arrived at the Cat House on the Kings in Parlier, Calif., and found the tubs carefully placed at the far end of the parking lot, said Beth Caffrey, a spokeswoman for the sanctuary.
“Just to leave them in the cold and rain is not OK,” she said.
Someone drilled air holes through the plastic and fitted each tub with a bed and blankets.
Inside the tubs, workers found three male cats and 11 female cats, three of which were pregnant and one that had recently given birth to two kittens.
The kittens, she said, were only a few days old.
The no-kill sanctuary could have offered low-cost or free options for spaying and neutering the cats if that
‘It’s distressing to me that these people couldn’t ask for help. We would have just helped.’ — Lynea Lattanzio, director of the Cat House on the Kings
was an issue, the workers said.
“This is a huge financial burden for us,” Caffrey said.
Sanctuary workers said they don’t know who dumped the cats because the event wasn’t recorded by security cameras.
“They knew what they were doing,” said the sanctuary’s director, Lynea Lattanzio, whose home and property houses more than 700 cats. “They went through a lot of effort.”
But what’s most troubling about the incident, she said, is that it could have been avoided.
“It’s distressing to me that these people couldn’t ask for help,” Lattanzio said. “We would have just helped.”
Nearly 25 years ago, Lattanzio began using her 12acre property for rescued and abandoned cats.
At the cat house, the felines have full rein of the refuge, which is on the banks of the Kings River.