Good Samaritan saves 15 cats

Stefanie Frith

COSTA MESA -- Jan McCandless said she won’t stop until she finds all

of the cats left behind by a woman recently evicted from her home in the

city.

So far, she’s rounded up 15 in a week -- but McCandless says it’s only

the beginning.

As the Costa Mesa resident catches the cats, she places them with the

Community Animal Network, the Irvine Animal Shelter and the Irvine

PetsMart adoption group.

“She has gone the extra mile,” said DiAnna Pfaff-Martin, founder of

the Community Animal Network. “We like it when people who call us are

willing to help.”

McCandless lives in the neighborhood around the home where the cats

have been living and said she often would walk by and see cats running

down the street and around the home. All of the cats were mostly kept

inside previously, she said.

“I would give the woman who rented the home there fliers and

information about shelters for the cats, but she never did anything,”

McCandless said. “Then, after she was evicted, I was walking by and saw a

cat in shock on the lawn. She just left them all there. I even saw

kittens on the rooftop. I knew I had to do something.”

When the owner of the home came to clean the house, McCandless said he

found urine-soaked furniture and carpet. She said he ran the cats out of

the house and cut down some of the bushes around the home to keep them

from hiding there.

“So I went out with another neighbor, and we started trapping all the

cats and making calls. We will continue to go out each night to get all

the cats. You can still see some running down the street,” McCandless

said. “We even had a cat give birth in one of the traps, but the kitten

didn’t make it. The whole thing is so sad.”

Pfaff-Martin said people with dozens of cats are more common than

people might think, and it needs to be stopped.

“These people end up with so many cats, and people will just dump

their cats on their doorsteps, and they just keep taking them in,” she

said. “They are called ‘collectors.’ This woman who left the cats could

go on and do it again. And then neighbors like [McCandless] have to take

over.”