Cats, Dogs, and Dollars

One man’s passion for animals raises millions for ‘super shelter’

Twenty-six years ago, Leo Grillo was driving toward Bakersfield, Calif., when he spotted an abandoned dog — a Doberman/Labrador mix — on

the side of the road. Mr. Grillo, who had moved to Los Angeles 18 months earlier to become an actor, put the dog in his car. The dog rested his head on Mr. Grillo’s lap, and a new career was born.

Mr. Grillo rescues abandoned dogs and cats in what he calls the wilderness — the desert, the nearby Angeles National Forest, or frankly just about any place outside of a backyard. He then provides the animals with a permanent home at a 125-acre shelter here, about 50 miles north of Los Angeles. The shelter has 960 dogs and 600 cats, all of which Mr. Grillo says he has rescued personally.

Maintaining the shelter is an expensive undertaking, but Mr. Grillo has proved to be a gifted fund raiser. The shelter, known as Dedication and Everlasting Love to Animals, or Delta Rescue, survives solely on private donations of more than $5.5-million per year, and enough cash flows in to finance another of Mr. Grillo’s passions — creating documentary and feature films about animals.

Delta Rescue, named for Delta, the first dog Mr. Grillo took in, is controversial in the animal-welfare world. The shelter spares no expense in providing a good life for its animals, but it also adheres to some practices that are unusual among humane organizations, and that reflect Mr. Grillo’s strongly held convictions about what’s right for the animals. What’s more, Mr. Grillo is quick to go to court — he has sued the Humane Society of the United States, National Geographic, and, most recently, Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control, and he plays up those legal battles in his letters to donors.

“The people who support us are radicals,” Mr. Grillo says. “They’re people who want to make sure the animals get a fair shake.”

24-Hour Security

Delta Rescue sits on a dry hillside with no sign at the gate. A security guard watches the entrance 24 hours a day. Tours are held for donors about once every three months, but with rare exceptions, no other visitors are allowed.

Most of the dogs live in straw bale and stucco houses in relatively large pens — some as large as 30 feet by 50 feet — that each contain two animals. The cats live in dozens of “catteries,” including one that has an elaborate Wild West theme. At any given time, the shelter hospital is providing chemotherapy to 10 to 15 dogs. A physical-therapy trailer has a whirlpool for hydro-massage, and a treadmill so that dogs can walk without overheating. (The trailer is air-conditioned.)

Gaylord Brown, the shelter’s full-time veterinarian, says he has no idea how much the medical care costs. “The nice thing about it is, I honestly don’t have to worry about that,” he says. “Leo says, ‘You tell me what needs to be done and I’ll get out there and see that it happens.’”

Mr. Grillo says the round-the-clock security is important because he does not want pet owners dumping animals on his facility, and because he fears that gang members who like to fight dogs will try to steal one of his pit bulls or Rottweilers, which are the most common dogs at the facility. That has already happened once. According to Mr. Grillo, a fight-ring coordinator from a nearby town sought a job at the shelter so he could find the most-aggressive dogs, and one dog disappeared.

Delta Rescue is a “no-kill” shelter, but that does not mean that animals are never euthanized. Mr. Grillo does put down dogs and cats when they stop eating and appear to have lost their zest for life. But Mr. Grillo keeps alive animals that are paralyzed and have no use of their legs, provided they seem content. That policy recently prompted the county’s district attorney to file a “cruelty to animals” charge against the shelter.

In its early days, Delta Rescue did put some of its dogs up for adoption, but that came to a halt in the early 1990s when Mr. Grillo learned that one of his favorite dogs, Bonnie, had been put to sleep by a family that had obtained her from the shelter a few years earlier. The family said its vet had recommended the euthanasia because of kidney problems, but Mr. Grillo says he had instructed the family to contact him first before putting her down. Mr. Grillo helped start a dialysis clinic for dogs and cats at the University of California at Davis in 1990 — touted as the first of its kind in the world — and he believes the clinic may have been able to keep Bonnie alive.

“I just kept thinking, ‘They killed my Bonnie, they killed my Bonnie,’” Mr. Grillo says. “‘Nobody will adopt one of my dogs again.’”

Motives Questioned

Critics of Delta Rescue suggest the no-adoption policy might be related to a desire on the part of Mr. Grillo to enlarge his own operation, and they say some of the animals would likely be happier if they were placed with a caring family.

Others wonder if Mr. Grillo is inadvertently picking up pets that may be temporarily lost, rather than abandoned. They say the numbers of stray animals in remote areas is not nearly as high as Mr. Grillo suggests. “We generally call dogs in the wilderness coyotes,” an executive at a local animal-welfare charity says, chuckling.

Many critics refuse to allow their names to be used when they criticize Mr. Grillo, citing Mr. Grillo’s zeal for lawsuits. In 1991, he sought an injunction to prevent the National Geographic Society from broadcasting Cats: Caressing the Tiger, a television special that included some footage of his work, because he was angry that the program portrayed cats as “killers” and that Delta Rescue didn’t receive a credit in the program. In the 1990s, he sued the Humane Society of the United States and the Glendale Humane Society, charging that the organizations were working together to disparage Delta Rescue’s reputation. Neither lawsuit was successful.

“He feuds with everybody,” says Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People, an independent newspaper that covers animal-protection issues. “He’s invented a lot of things himself, and he feels like he knows what he’s doing, and that other people are trying to tell him what to do. Very often, historically, they’ve been wrong.”

Mr. Grillo says that he has only once gotten in hot water with a pet owner. A Delta Rescue donor spotted a German shepherd on a tour of the shelter, and thought it looked like the pet he had lost 15 years earlier, when the dog was 7. Mr. Grillo, who considered it improbable that the dog would have lived that long, asked the owner to send veterinary X-rays that could be matched against Delta Rescue’s own records, and the owner never followed up.

Mr. Grillo believes the critics of Delta Rescue are mostly just envious of his fund-raising success. “In the underground newspaper that the dogs write,” he says, “we are the stars.”

A Mouse Named Scrat

On a recent morning, Mr. Grillo meets a reporter for breakfast at Crazy Otto’s, a local restaurant. When the bill is paid and it’s time to leave, Mr. Grillo grabs a paper grocery sack from his booth, in which he has been hiding a cage that contains an emaciated, inch-long mouse that he found in his garage. His 6-year-old daughter, Meguire, named it Scrat, after the mouse in the movie Ice Age. For days Mr. Grillo has been toting Scrat nearly everywhere he goes so that he can feed it a soy-milk formula through a dropper at three-hour intervals.

Even Mr. Grillo’s critics do not question his commitment to animals. At his own house, where he lives with his wife, Stacy, and daughters, Erica and Meguire, he says he currently has a dozen dogs, 60 cats, and 90 kittens, including some animals that have not adapted well to the shelter.

“There are some parts of his home that you can’t even go in because there will be an animal that has a problem and will be likely to bite you,” says Jerry Huntsinger, a former fund-raising consultant who has worked closely with Delta Rescue.

A few months after picking up Delta along the highway, Mr. Grillo discovered a few dozen more abandoned dogs during an outing to the Angeles National Forest. He put out some food for them, but found he couldn’t sleep thinking about how they were faring on their own, so he eventually brought them to his home in Glendale. He had 29 animals in his backyard at one point — drawing the ire of neighbors — before purchasing and renovating a condemned kennel. He moved to his present site in Acton in 1986.

A local newspaper wrote about the shelter in 1981, shortly after it received its tax exemption. Within a week, a dozen people had sent $10 or $15 checks.

As word spread, more checks flowed in. But each month brought more bills, and Mr. Grillo knew he had to convert one-time donors into consistent supporters. He bought books, and consulted with experts, to learn about fund raising, but found that paying for assistance wasn’t helping much. His own letters sent to prospective donors, he says, yielded more money than letters scripted by consultants.

60 Employees

The shelter has no set budget, according to Mr. Grillo. When gifts exceed the cost of operating the shelter (with a staff of 60, that cost was nearly $4-million in 2003), Mr. Grillo finds other ways to put the money to use.

In 1990 he called the University of California at Davis to inquire about getting dialysis treatment for one of his dogs that had chronic kidney failure. The university’s School of Veterinary Medicine had pioneered animal dialysis, but it administered the procedure only rarely, using “bargain basement” equipment, according to Larry Cowgill, the Davis professor who invented the procedure.

Within days after Mr. Cowgill talked to Mr. Grillo, an overnight package arrived at the veterinary school with a $50,000 check from Delta Rescue for new dialysis equipment. For years the shelter also sponsored dialysis treatment for clients who could not afford it. Mr. Grillo says the shelter only used money from donors who wanted to support the dialysis clinic, or who checked a box giving the shelter latitude to use the funds in whatever areas had the greatest need. (As it turns out, none of Mr. Grillo’s animals have actually benefited from the Davis clinic’s work, where dialysis is typically used for animals with acute, rather than chronic, problems.)

To date, the veterinary school has provided more than 2,000 dialysis treatments to about 200 dogs and 140 cats who probably had only days to live, and the procedure has saved roughly half of the animals, Mr. Cowgill says. “The contributions that Leo has made have been instrumental in making animal dialysis a reality today,” Mr. Cowgill says. “It wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

‘The Rescuer’

Mr. Grillo also has used Delta Rescue revenue to develop movies designed to educate the public about the plight of abandoned animals. Initially, the moviemaking focused on documentaries, including The Rescuer, a feature-length film about Mr. Grillo’s own experiences saving animals from the wilderness. That film evolves nearly every year — and short versions of it are sent to donors and are available on Delta Rescue’s Web site — but it has never been finished as a feature-length film.

More recently, Mr. Grillo has focused on family-oriented feature films, hoping to find a hit like Benji, a 1974 movie that its creator had a hard time selling to Hollywood studios, but which has spawned a series of sequels, television specials, and other products that have grossed a total of $230-million. Mr. Grillo thought he had found the answer with Clancy, described as “a plucky abandoned puppy’s search for love and security,” and the project went through three separate screenwriters to get the right feel. But the project is now on hold, in part because the script calls for so many animals that he thinks the filming would turn into a fiasco.

Though he still believes Clancy has possibilities as an animated film, Mr. Grillo currently is advertising for other film scripts focusing on animals that could be made on a budget of about $500,000. The movie would be made by Leo Grillo Productions, the for-profit company through which he earns the bulk of his income. Mr. Grillo receives no salary directly from Delta Rescue, but his production company, which grosses between $100,000 and $200,000 per year, gets some of its work from two film-production companies — one a nonprofit, the other a for-profit — connected to Delta Rescue.

Mr. Grillo says it makes good financial sense for the shelter to have a stake in the feature films, and that the money used for filmmaking comes from donors who have designated their funds for that purpose. “With any luck, it will make one hell of a profit to pump money back into the shelter,” he says. “I know so much about movies and about how they work and how you sell them that it would almost be unfair for me to make an animal movie, and have a Benji, and not have that reflect in any way on these animals.”

Marc Owens, formerly the top charity regulator at the Internal Revenue Service and now a lawyer in Washington, says the filmmaking operation at Delta Rescue appears to be “high risk” for two reasons. First, a feature film might not be considered related business income if it is viewed by auditors primarily as entertainment, rather than spreading a message that furthers Delta Rescue’s mission. Second, the IRS knows that some founders of charities use a web of related organizations to siphon off revenue from the main enterprise, so Mr. Grillo must be careful to keep the contracts between Leo Grillo Productions and the nonprofit organizations as “businesslike” as possible. “You’ll want an independent board overseeing the relationships so that you don’t have the same people on both sides of the deal,” he says.

Mr. Grillo says he considers the feature films to be related to Delta Rescue’s mission, but says he established the separate film-making companies so that if a regulator were to deem them unrelated, the decision would not affect Delta Rescue.

“The worse thing that happens is that we have to pay taxes,” he says.

As for his own compensation, Mr. Grillo says he charges a flat fee for various aspects of his filmmaking work, regardless of whether it is for Delta Rescue and related organizations, or for an unrelated company.

Desert Patrol

Mr. Grillo has ambitious plans for his rescue operations, as well. He has helped the Desert Managers Group, a consortium of federal and state agencies that collectively manages 25 million acres of Southern California desert, look into reports of uncontrolled or feral dogs attacking or threatening humans and wildlife.

Mr. Grillo has offered to rescue as many of the animals as possible. Depending on the number of dogs involved, that could ultimately mean that Delta Rescue would add a second shelter on the eastern side of the desert, near Nevada.

Even as he considers expansions, however, Mr. Grillo is spending time and money defending his current operations. Los Angeles County Animal Care and Control, for example, is pressing Delta Rescue to go through the same inspection and licensing process that other animal facilities face. Mr. Grillo says that previous officials at the county agency permitted the Acton shelter to operate without a license because of its unique mission.

Mr. Grillo maintains that the county is only going after him now because he told his donors that a rendering company that disposes of euthanized animals — including tens of thousands of animals annually from L.A. County — was selling animal byproducts to U.S. companies as cattle and chicken feed. A state inspection found Mr. Grillo’s claim to be inaccurate.

On its Web site, the county says it was forced to obtain a warrant to do a routine inspection of Delta Rescue roughly a year ago. (County animal-control officials declined to talk to The Chronicle.) Based on the inspection, the district attorney filed four infraction and three misdemeanor charges, ranging from “illegal kennel” to “cruelty to animals.”

Mr. Grillo maintains that the county’s code doesn’t work well with his shelter. Delta Rescue was cited, for example, for not using concrete or pea gravel in its runs, but Mr. Grillo maintains that those surfaces are too hard on the joints of a dog that may be in the run for a decade or more.

“We have a care-for-life facility where we must do things a certain way,” he says. “They have a death-care facility where they must do things a certain way. The difference between those two is why we shouldn’t get licensed by them.”

Mr. Grillo believes that today’s fights will some day make it easier on his daughter Meguire, who has told him she plans to one day take over the shelter. He wants to hand her a special permit, chiseled in stone, to operate a no-kill shelter without annual inspections.

As he talks about his daughter’s future, he glances down at his watch: time to feed Scrat, the tiny mouse.

“My daughter’s birthday wish was that this mouse shall live,” Mr. Grillo says, expressing his confidence that the shelter will be in good hands when he steps aside. “She gets it.”