Peininsula Feline’s Felicitous Friend
by Robb Fulcher
Rufus, a large, orange and white feral cat, showed up in a Palos Verdes back yard 11 years ago. The angels were with him that day – the yard belongs to Donna Ciminera, whose efforts have led to the rescue of many thousands of cats living rough and deadly dangerous lives on the streets.
Ciminera, who is the guiding light of the Pet Protectors League, began feeding Rufus.
She also wanted to have him neutered, to prevent the creation of more baby strays. It took a patient month to lure him into a cage that is used to trap feral animals, by placing food inside of it.
Eventually he was trapped, neutered and returned to the yard.
As time passed, Rufus ventured onto the patio more and more, to gaze in at other cats inside the house. Ciminera wanted to move him inside, and this time it took a year and-a-half to trap him again.
He stayed first in Ciminera’s office room. Six months passed before she could pick him up.
Now he’s 15 years old, “a big, macho cat” and “a real sweetheart.”
Ciminera, 82, and her all-volunteer organization placed 138 cats and kittens for adoption last year, and returned 57 feral cats to the outdoors after they were spayed or neutered.
“And we’re past those numbers this year,” Ciminera said.
Beginning in New York, where she spearheaded the building of a 125-cat adoption shelter and served as director for 23 years, she has saved too many thousands of felines to count.
“This is always my mantra, I do as much as I can for as many as I can. We can’t save them all,” Ciminera said.
The path to a shelter
Ciminera grew up with three siblings and “plenty of dogs and cats in our house,” she said. “I’ve always loved animals. I lived in a home that always took in strays.”
As an adult in New York, Ciminera worked on Wall Street and lived on Long Island with her husband Mike and daughter Victoria.
Ciminera grew concerned about a large stray cat population in the Long Island town of Huntington, and together with others, formed the League for Animal Protection in 1973.
In time, the League partnered with the town of Huntington to open a shelter.
“They had a dog pound only. The only cat they would accept is a dead cat,” Ciminera said, referring to the municipal practice of removing dead animals from the streets.
Numerous hurdles presented themselves in the effort to open a cat shelter. For instance, a law had to be changed.
“There was a state law in New York that dogs were domestic animals, and cats were farm animals,” Ciminera said.
The agriculture law was originally passed in 1888.
Meanwhile the League, with Ciminera as director, tirelessly raised funds, and worked to convince the city council to allow a cat shelter to be built.
“It took two or three years to get the building opened. In the meantime we were renting storefronts to show our animals” to potential adoptees, she said.
“Overpopulation of the cats was evident in Huntington, but everybody’s position was ‘Don’t put it near me. I don’t want a shelter in my back yard,” Ciminera said.
“You try to do something. You think it would be so simple.”
With city approval granted, the League took its next step.
“The plans were drawn up on my kitchen table,” Ciminera said.
Her husband Mike, who was with the forerunner to Northrup Grumman, took the plans in to work, where engineers redrew them in architectural form.
Free-roaming felines
In 1982 the shelter, The Grateful Paw, was opened for 125 cats at a time.
“We didn’t want cages. We designed free-roaming rooms. We had a kitten nursery, a room for middle aged cats, and a room for older cats,” Ciminera said.
An isolation room was set aside to quarantine newly arrived cats until they could be vaccinated and checked for diseases by veterinarians, and to socialize them.
Outdoor cat runs opened from the rooms, with donated tree branches lying around for use as scratching posts.
The outdoor runs were built on the far side from the dog shelter, and while the cats heard barking, “It didn’t seem to bother them.”
The facility still stands, still in use, next to the city dog shelter.
“It was a great facility, and still is,” Ciminera said.
Donna Ciminera with newly rescued cats. Photo courtesy of PPL
On to the hill
Donna spent 23 years as League director, then the Cimineras followed Mike’s work out to California. They leased a home in Rancho Palos Verdes before settling in Rolling Hills Estates.
“He moved in 1995, and I followed in 1996 in an RV with two dogs and seven cats. I wouldn’t put them in an airplane,” Ciminera said. “My friend Judy went with me, and we took a week to get out here. We had a good time doing it. I called it my ‘Thelma & Louise’ trip.”
Discarded pets
Out west, she took a three-month break from cat rescues, put off by her “disgust” at the casual way many people could get rid of a pet.
“For instance, I’m moving – that’s a famous one – into a place that doesn’t accept animals. I would never do that.
“Or, my children went off to college and I don’t want to take care of it. Or I’ve developed an allergy – I don’t always believe that.
“The saddest is when someone has died, and no one else wants the animal.”
That’s how the Cimineras got Pippi Longstockings, a “beautiful” Sheltie Pomeranian mix, who they plucked from a “rescue bundle” of three cats and four dogs.
At first, “Pippi was so afraid of everything. She was 7, and she had lived with an older woman all her life,” Ciminera said, adding, “She absolutely loved my husband, which was great. She was his sidekick. Wherever he went, she went.”
Climbing fresh fences
Soon after arriving in Palos Verdes, Ciminera was drawn back into cat rescuing. She joined a New Neighbors group and met Diane Weinberger, who was feeding strays in a colony of about 20 at Los Verdes Golf Course.
Ciminera helped Weinberger get the cats spayed or neutered.
The cats “were down near the clubhouse, and the health department really did not want them there,” Ciminera said.
In the course of things, the women had to climb a fence – “we were younger then” – and Ciminera took the cats who appeared adoptable home with her.
She worked with Point Vicente Animal Hospital and another, now defunct vet in Redondo Beach, and adopted them out through word of mouth and posting flyers.
The women continued working together. In time, Weinberger found an organization called Pet Protectors, which turned out to be defunct, and was happy to turn its reins over to the women.
It took about a year to secure tax-exempt status as a new nonprofit organization.
In 2000 the new group became active as the Pet Protectors League, known in the cat-saving community as PPL.
Trouble spots
The League’s volunteers work with about 10 households who foster cats until they can be adopted.
(Ciminera stressed that the League is constantly seeking more people to foster the felines.)
The League also works with about five active trappers who capture cats for spaying and neutering. The captured cats are adopted out if possible, but if too feral they are released back into the wild.
“The San Pedro/Wilmington area is the worst,” Ciminera said.
The Harbor area, “a bad location,” was made more difficult by an initial municipal reluctance to allow trapping.
“They didn’t want us trapping down there…but we would try to tell them, if we spay and neuter them they won’t keep having more litters,” Ciminera said.
‘Truly passionate’
Longtime trapper and adoption helper Lynn Grosch, of San Pedro, said Ciminera and her group have made her work much easier.
“She’s helped me a lot. Her organization has helped me a lot,” Grosch said.
She learned of the Pet Protectors League after she had been contacted about a large cat colony in Lomita.
Grosch added it to the list of colonies she was working on, and when she worked her way to Lomita she found that PPL had “stepped up” in the meantime.
A “coordinated effort of trappers” had caught almost all of the cats for spaying and neutering, leaving Grosch with only two cats – the slipperiest ones – to trap.
It’s hard to get timely spay and neuter appointments with overbooked veterinarians, and Grosch leans on PPL to set up the appointments for her.
“Donna has been wonderful,” Grosch said. “She and her organization have been able to connect me with appointments in much shorter order.”
PPL also helps defray the costs of spaying, neutering, vaccinating and flea eradication, Grosch said.
She said trappers also look to PPL to show their captured cats at community adoption events, and to take the trappers’ foundlings into the PPL adoption system.
“Donna truly is passionate about helping the kitties,” Grosch said.
Covid and coyotes
The covid pandemic has exacerbated the problem of excess cats.
“There’s a big problem now with people who adopted cats or dogs during covid, because they were home and their kids were home, and now they’re abandoning them.”
“We [PPL] don’t get returns. We don’t adopt them to just anybody. But shelters can’t do that. It’s a real problem if you have a kennel for 80 dogs, and you have 200 dogs.”
“Another sad thing now for the colonies is coyotes,” Ciminera said. “The number of cats coyotes have taken – nowadays you can’t have an outside cat.
“I don’t know the reason, but [coyotes] have certainly urbanized. I’ve seen them loping down the road right in front of me.”
Forever young
At 82, Ciminera is not letting up in her cat-saving mission.
“If you’re busy, you keep young and keep going,” she said.
However, she’s holding firm at the current number of permanent, non-foster pets – five cats and Teddy, a terrier spaniel who someone found huddled against a freeway median one day.
Actually, it’s Ciminera’s daughter who is holding the line. After all, her mom’s will designates her as the guardian of the pets, and her family already has two cats, two dogs, aquariums full of lizards and turtles, and a horse.
To contact Pet Protectors League, email Petprotectorsleague@gmail.com PEN