Last Updated on May 28, 2026 by admin
The property is forty-one acres, on a dirt road outside the small town of Julian in eastern San Diego County. From the road, you can see, mostly, oak trees. You cannot see the cats. The cats live in the shed row, and in the smaller outbuildings behind the main barn, and in the pile of decommissioned horse trailers that has been sitting in the back pasture since around 2019.
The count, as of the third week of operations, is more than four hundred cats. Plus thirty dogs. Plus around one hundred and sixty-five horses, some ponies, several goats, and an emu nobody can find documentation for.
The first cat carried out by the Humane Society field team was a small black-and-white domestic shorthair with a torn left ear and a sour expression on her face. She walked, of her own accord, out from under the loose plywood beside the feed bin. She sat down on the dirt and she yowled.
The volunteer who picked her up called her Pickle, on the spot, because the volunteer’s last cat had been a sour-faced black-and-white named Pickle, and because somebody had to say something when a sour-faced black-and-white walked out from under the feed-bin plywood and decided that the conversation was now going to happen.
Pickle weighed three pounds and four ounces. She should have weighed seven.
The on-site vet ran her hands over Pickle’s ribs and shook her head. Pickle bit the vet’s hand in the gentle, no-real-pressure way that says I see what you are doing, and I am noting that I am still in charge of this. Then she let the vet keep going.
By the end of that first afternoon, the field team had carried out forty-three cats. By the end of the first week, two hundred and twelve. The current operating count is four hundred and six.
The numbers were not, at any point, supposed to be that high. The property had operated as a private rescue sanctuary for years — the kind of place that takes the cats no other shelter can, the seniors and the bottle-feeders and the ones with chronic medical needs. Then the woman who ran it got sick. Then she got sicker. Then the help she had stopped showing up, and then the help she had hired stopped showing up, and then the next eighteen months were the eighteen months during which forty-one acres in a quiet part of San Diego County became a place where four hundred cats lived without enough food and without consistent water and, by the end, without much of anyone at all.
The investigation is ongoing. The criminal questions will sort themselves out in court. The cats — the cats are a different problem, and a more immediate one.
The Humane Society partnered with San Diego County Animal Services first. Then with Pasadena Humane. Then with Humane Society of Marin. Then with LA County Animal Care and Control, when it became clear that one regional shelter system was not going to be able to absorb four hundred cats on top of its existing intake. Some cats are being trailered to other parts of California. Some are going as far as Arizona and Nevada, to partner shelters that have agreed, on twenty-four hours’ notice, to take twenty cats at a time.
Pickle is not going anywhere yet. Pickle is in a folded fleece blanket on a folding chair in the on-site command tent, in a foster’s lap, with one of her three-pounds-and-four-ounces of self currently weighted against the foster’s wrist. She is going to gain weight on a slow re-feeding plan. She is going to lose, probably, the worst tooth on her bottom left. She is going to be, in about a month, somebody’s cat — somebody who walks into a partner shelter in Pasadena or in Marin or in Phoenix and sees a sour-faced black-and-white sitting in cage seven and decides, on the spot, that the conversation is now going to happen.
Pickle does not know any of this. Pickle, in the folding chair, has eaten half a saucer of warm wet food. She has bitten the foster’s thumb in the gentle, no-real-pressure way. She has not yet decided about him.
She is, by every available measure, the first one out. Three hundred and ninety-nine more behind her.