But Workers Hiss About Evictions : Cats Litter College Campus

They raise a racket at night, infest folks with fleas and leave droppings in the wrong places, but the cats of Orange Coast College have won a reprieve from eviction.

You could say it was because of a mew and cry.

Hundreds of homeless cats have roamed the Costa Mesa college’s campus for years, mostly at night, said Cliff Travioli, chief groundskeeper. Some were abandoned pets, he said, and others are wild--the offspring of many generations born on campus and never tamed.

This week, Travioli began trapping some of the cats in cages and turning them over to an animal lovers group. But that operation brought so many complaints that Travioli’s boss, Dave Heikes, called it off Friday.

“We stopped it until we can get some direction from somebody,” Heikes said.

Travioli added, “We started out with two problems: fleas and cat doo. Now we have three. People don’t want us catching the cats.”

The cat catching involved nighttime stakeouts with mackerel-baited cages at the animals’ favorite spots. It wasn’t particularly successful; only four cats were lured into the cages in three nights.

But some campus workers, fearing that the cats would be killed, protested loudly.

Heikes said that no one planned to kill the cats and that they were being turned over to Concerned Animal Lovers of Fullerton to be put up for adoption.

But Vera Snyder, a campus security guard who owns three cats and who takes care of some of the campus cats, said she wasn’t convinced of that.

“I was out there when they were picking up the cats, and a lady (from the Fullerton group) told me that they were going to kill them,” Snyder said. “She said they were too wild and that it would be too time consuming to try to train them.”

Cherie Bennett of Concerned Animal Lovers said the group planned to put the tame cats up for adoption, work with those that were frightened and “gently and humanely put to sleep” the wild ones.

Snyder said she caught four cats to save them from Travioli. She and five other campus employees are helping her find homes for them, she said, and they are trying to form a club that would reduce the number of cats through spaying, neutering and adoption.

Heikes said he doesn’t hate cats--it’s just that they’re a nuisance at the 180-acre campus. They live under trailers, behind buildings and hang around three snack bars, where there is plenty of garbage.

Employees contribute to the problem by feeding the cats, Travioli said.

“The reason we couldn’t trap very many is that they are so well fed,” he said.

Judy Walker, director of a campus day care center, said employees there had to replace the sand in sandboxes in the play yard and cover them with tarps at night because the cats used them as litter boxes.

Some workers complained that they got fleas from the cats that infested their homes.

Snyder dismisses such complaints and defends the cats.

“How does anyone know that the cats that used the sandboxes are the cats from here?” she asked. “I work here at night, and I’ve seen cats coming over from the apartment complexes across the street.”

The fleas, she said, could come from anywhere.

As for a suggestion that any of the cats could be dangerous, Snyder has a ready retort.

“Nobody has ever seen a headline that says, ‘Cat Mauls Orange Coast College Student,’ have they?”