The Dog Who Loved Cats... ...And the Humans Who Saved Her Newsday, 25 October 1995 By Matt Villano Staff Writer In the shadows of an early-morning darkness, Philip Gonzalez leans over the open trunk of a running car and, with his left hand, sorts through unopened cans of cat food he uses to feed the neighborhood's stray cats. His 6-year-old dog, Ginny, watches his every move. It is 4:30 a.m., and to the human ear, except for the soft clanks the cans make when they strike each other, all is quiet. But not to Ginny. She runs a few feet from Philip's side and freezes, staring at the loading dock of an empty window factory. Ginny makes her ears stand as tall as they can, like horns. She trots a few steps closer to the factory, then freezes again. She barks, then darts toward the loading dock, barking furiously. Philip tries to chase her, but Ginny is too fast. She heads down the ramp and skids to a stop in front of a 2-foot-high pile of shattered glass. Ginny paces around it. She bats away the top six inches with her front paws. The soft bottoms of her paws bleed from the glass shards, but Ginny doesn't seem to care. She just keeps digging. After she has displaced about half the pile, she sticks her face in the glas sand comes out clutching a tiny, bloody ball of fur in her mouth. She limps over to Philip and gently places the bloody creature in front of her owner. S?he licks it. The animal stretches its little legs, yawns and lets out a faint meow. Ginny barks, stares at her incredulous owner, barks again, then continues to lick her new friend. "The veterinarian said that if Ginny didn't find that poor kitten when she did, it would have died," Philip says, days later, from his Long Beach apartment. "She saved its life." For Ginny, who is half Siberian husky and half terrier schnauzer, such heroics have become routine. In the past five years, she has helped almost 200 stray cats - and one bedraggled man - find better lives. Many of those she has saved have been physically handicapped or sick, and most of them, like the kitten, would have died without Ginny's help. It is a story so heart-warming, so unusual, that this week a book written about Ginny will begin appearing in bookstores. Ginny has two human partners who help her save her feline friends. Philip, 45, and his friend and neighbor Sheilah Pincus feed the local stray cats twice every day. Many of the disabled strays are too sick or injured to get the food Philip and Sheilah leave for them. That's where Ginny comes in. Her job is to find the weaker animals and bring them to Philip and Sheilah, who take the cats to the local humane society, pay for their shots and find them adoptive families. "Sure, I take a part in saving these cats, but I'm just Ginny's partner," he offers. "She's the animal savior. She's the boss, and me and Sheilah are just there to help her out." Ginny's most important rescue came five years ago. Before she helped any stray cats, she rescued Philip. He had worked as a steamfitter in Manhattan until his right arm got caught in a machine at work, shattering his bones and heaving him with almost no use of the arm. "After the accident at work, I was so down on myself, I wouldn't do anything," he says. "I just sat in my apartment all day and thought about how much better it would have been to be dead." Sheilah talked Philip into adopting a dog, but he says the only kind of dog he wanted at the time was a big, pure-bred male. Philip inspected all the dogs at the Long Beach Animal Shelter, and although he didn't like any in particular, one dog seemed to like him. It was Ginny. He says she barked at him until, out of frustration, he agreed to take her for a walk. Then it happened. "Something just clicked on that walk," he remembers aloud. "We looked at each other and right then and there, I knew that she was going to be my dog. It was magic." One of the shelter's doctors told Philip that Ginny herself was once a stray, just like the cats. A landlord found her starving in the closet of an abandoned apartment. Ginny was so sick when she arrived at the shelter, that the doctors considered putting her to sleep. But they nurtured her back to health until she was ready to be adopted. Philip, born in Puerto Rico and reared in East Rockaway, adopted her on the spot. "Nobody wanted Ginny, and nobody wanted me, because of my arm," he says. "Well we found each other. I saved her from loneliness and she saved me from complete depression. It was a match made in heaven. It might seem clichéd, but instantly, she became my best friend. People look at me and say, 'Get a life, man,' but I tell them that this is my life and I love it very much. It's all thanks to Ginny." Ginny's story inspired Philip to co-author a book about her, titled "The Dog Who Rescues Cats" (HarperCollins). Philip received a $37,000 advance for the book, which he has already spent on cat food and medical bills for some of the most handicapped cats. He receives 40 cents for each copy sold, all of which, he says, will go into a special cat-food fund. The dog's heroics were first noticed by a volunteer at the animal shelter, who tipped off Good Housekeeping magazine. After two articles about the dog, HarperCollins Publishers caught on and pursued Ginny and Philip for a book deal. Philip wrote the book with the help of Lenore Fleischer, who also wrote the screenplay to the 1988 movie, "Twins." When Philip adopted Ginny, he knew nothing about her knack for finding stray cats in need. On their third day together, Ginny began barking and tugging on her leash until she wriggled free. She ran toward a vacant parking lot, where she found a stray cat hiding in the grass. Ginny touched noses with the cat, then began grooming it. The animals stayed together for almost three hours. "What's amazing about this dog is not necessarily how she reacts to cats, but how these wild cats react to her," says Ginny's veterinarian, Dr. Louis Gelfand of Merrick. "All the old dog-and-cat cartoons are correct; cats don't usually get along with dogs. But for some reason, these cats - these wild, stray cats - love this dog. That's just not normal." According to Dr. Victoria Voith, an animal behavior consultant in Kalamazoo, Mich., Ginny's "natural attraction" to cats may be the result of an overpowering maternal instinct. "It's not uncommon for females who tend to raise large numbers of young to adopt other offspring as their own," Voith says. "It's just more common for them to adopt infants of their own species. Ginny is obviously maternally motivated, which means that she'll love anything that will let her." All dogs are adept at detecting hidden cats, Voith says, and most dogs will be inclined to seek out physically handicapped cats because their instincts tell them that the disabled cats are weaker and easier to approach. "Because Philip is positively responsive to Ginny's behavior, she's made a practice of it," Voith adds. "Philip's love for these strays is basically telling Ginny that it's OK for her to find more and more. They feed on each other." Sheilah offers a more spiritual explanation for Ginny's behavior. "She must have been a cat in another life," says Sheilah, also 45. "All these strays know it, we know it - you don't need science to figure that out." After Philip saw how Ginny captivated stray cats, he began taking cans of cat food with him on his walks. When Ginny found strays to play with, Philip would feed them. Finally, Philip decided it was time to get Ginny a cat of her own. He took Ginny back to the animal shelter from which she came, and let her inspect the cages to find a cat she liked. She stopped in front of a cage in which a white kitten was pawing the latch and meowing. Ginny started whimpering. "It was as if Ginny was saying, 'Gimmie that cat, Phil. I want that one,'" Philip says. "She was just like a little child. I know dogs can't talk, but that's what her whimpering said." He adopted the kitten and named her Madam. About two weeks later, Philip discovered that Madam was deaf. "There were hundreds of cats at the shelter that day, and out of all of them, Ginny picked the only one that was deaf," Sheilah says. "It was more than a coincidence. She knew that little kitten was disabled. That's why Ginny wanted her." One cat wasn't good enough for Ginny, who began to pick out other cats on her walks with Philip. When she saw a cat she wanted, Philip says, she repeated the "Gimmie that cat" whimper until he took the cat home. After Madam, Ginny found a group of local children beating and kicking a cat named Vogue, whom she rescued. Then came Revlon, who has only one eye. Next was Topsy, a cat with cerebral palsy that Ginny plucked from a musty air-conditioning vent in an abandoned building. She found Betty Boop, a cat with no hind feet, hopping around on the stumps like a rabbit. After a while, she found Jackie, a blind cat, and Blondie, who has feline immunodeficiency virus, the cat version of HIV. "It's like she's got this radar of the heart that enables her to find animals in need," Philip says. "Once she finds them, she just loves them and loves them. That's all she knows how to do." Philip says he likes to keep the handicapped cats, in case nobody ever wants to adopt them. But Long Beach city ordinances do not allow homeowners to keep more than 10 cats or dogs in a home, so Philip had to give some of the cats to Sheilah. Now, between the two of them, they have 19 cats, 12 of which are disabled. Ginny continues to pick out the stray cats she likes - disabled and healthy - and since neither Philip nor Sheilah can keep any more, they take the cats to the animal shelter where other people can adopt them. But not everybody thinks Ginny is an angel. "If I had a gun, I'd shoot that dog and the folks who own it," says one neighbor who wishes to remain anonymous. "They feed those stray cats right in front of my house and I hear them meowing all night. Those cats are only good for breeding more wild cats - like gremlins, you know?" It is hard to estimate how many stray cats there are in Long Beach. Animal experts and employees of the city manager's office believe this year's stray cat population in Long Beach has already topped 500. Because many residents only live there for part of the year, a large percentage of cats are abandoned. To keep the stray population down, Philip tried to neuter and inoculate every male cat he encounters. Gelfand notches the ears of all the strays Philip brings him. Since 1990, he has developed records for about 120 cats. If Philip finds a stray in need of medical attention, he pays for the animal's medical bills. Some months, Philip says he has spent more than $1,000 on one cat. "Some people think I'm crazy for spending all my money on stray cats," he says. "Why do I need it when I can use it to prolong the lives of these poor, homeless cats?" Although Philip and Sheilah have not found homes for most of these strays, they still take care of them. On their daily feeding trips, they stop at seven spots, prepare big trays of food, then watch from Sheilah's car to make sure all of the strays eat. Between the two of them, they spend about $300 on cat food every week. They buy so much food - the expensive stuff like Iams, Whiskas, and Tender Vittles - that many local pet food stores sell them cases at wholesale prices. And since Philip doesn't work, subsisting on his worker's compensation check, he says that some weeks, he must sell some of his gold jewelry to pay for his share of the food. The feeding runs themselves have become tactical operations. Sheilah drives, Philip feeds and Ginny oversees it all from the front seat. Without fail, each trip takes them 57 minutes. On this day, there are about six cats at each stop and 40 cats on the whole route. Ginny has become so well-known in the feral feline community that when Philip takes her for a walk, a parade of stray cats follows her down the street. "People have stopped me and called me the Pied Piper of Long Beach," Philip says, chuckling. "I tell them it's not me. The cats follow Ginny. They think she's some sort of God or something. It's crazy, but it's true." The dog spent a rainy night last week relaxing with her new kitten on the couch in Sheilah's apartment. The pair watched "lassie" reruns on Nickelodeon. Occasionally, Ginny sat up and cleaned a different spot on the kitten's fur. But she didn't lick, like most dogs, she used her teeth, something only cats do. The kitten didn't care how Ginny was cleaning it. It was purring so loudly that it sounded like the motor of Sheilah's car. And Philip, perhaps Ginny's most rewarding rescue, compares the dog who changed his life to some of the most famous humanitarians. "She just like Florence Nightingale or Mother Teresa, only better," he says. "She's an angel. And whatever explains why she is what she is, I don't even care. All I know is that Ginny has changed my life. She is the most special thing in the world, and I love her very much."