Center Cultivates Respect for Wildlife

When the Los Angeles Zoo’s “Wild in the City” show was canceled three years ago and its animal stars were laid off, employees who had worked with the critters since most of them were babies worried about where they would go.

Phoenix, a stately mountain lion, his sister Sagebrush and their friends would have gone to good homes, but many wondered how they would handle a new environment and possibly being separated.

Enter Mollie Hogan, one of the zoo’s trainers. Upon leaving the zoo, the animals were temporarily housed in the Moorpark College Teaching Zoo, Hogan’s alma mater. But Bonsai, a wildcat that had bonded with her, grew seriously ill and Hogan vowed to give the animals a permanent home.

She worked to buy the animals, secured the necessary state and local permits and rented land in Topanga Canyon to give them a taste of their natural habitats. The animals--including Phoenix, Sagebrush and Bonsai, as well as Panama, a bobcat, Ty, a barn owl, Rima, a kinkajou, and Sally, a bat-eared fox--will live out their days at Hogan’s Wildlife Care Center, deep in the Santa Monica Mountains.

While the animals are locked in cages designed to cater to their wild instincts, some of the smaller ones are allowed to wander the gated compound during the day. The animals that can be controlled are even taken for walks on leashes through the canyons.

“I don’t believe in captivity, but it’s something that people have created,” Hogan said. “We can use it to teach people about wild animals. We can’t release them, so you either kill them or take care of them.”

To pay the center’s estimated $1,000-a-month food bill, the animals have gone back to work to supplement donations to the Nature of Wildworks,Hogan’s nonprofit organization.

Hogan and Marjorie Fuchs, one of the organization’s 30 volunteers, take the animals to schools--in paid appearances--to spread concern for wildlife and the need to conserve natural habitats.

They also bring along Bob, a domesticated feline, to instill in children knowledge of the difference between the big cats and the tabby, which volunteers joke is the most ferocious animal on the lot.

For more information about the Nature of Wildworks, call (310) 455-0550.