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The kitten’s paw pads were raw and red.
Her whiskers, mostly gone. Her ears, singed. Her eyelids, swollen.
As Vanessa Ortiz, a veterinary technician at the Pasadena Humane Society, picked up the kitten, she paused and reminded herself to move more gingerly.
“You have to be careful when you pet them,” she said, “because they’re crispy.”
The badly burned kitten — 3, maybe 4 months old — was being treated in the intensive care unit at the Pasadena Humane Society after a firefighter found her this week in a part of Altadena scorched by the Eaton fire.
The shelter has taken in more than 500 animals displaced by the blaze, which began on Jan. 7 and is still burning. The Eaton fire and another fire that broke out in Pacific Palisades earlier that day have burned more than 37,000 acres and destroyed at least 10,697 structures. Officials have confirmed 27 deaths.
Many who fled the flames were forced to make devastating choices about their pets. Some, terrified, hid or refused to leave. In other cases, their owners were away from home and could not safely return.
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Los Angeles city and county animal control officers have been scouring the burn areas, searching for lost pets and leaving food and water. But residents, who are growing increasingly frustrated, still cannot access vast evacuation zones blocked off by members of the National Guard and law enforcement officers. Many worry about their furry family members.
At the Pasadena Humane Society, many of the displaced pets were brought in by owners who had to evacuate and could not take the animals with them to hotel rooms, emergency shelters or friends’ homes where they were staying. Others, like the kitten, were found among the wreckage — their names and owners, if they have an owner, unknown.
At the shelter this week, there were hundreds of cats and dogs. Around 50 chickens. Three water dragon lizards. A few rabbits and goats. A pony that hung out at an office before being moved to a horse facility. And a 28-year-old, 200-lb. tortoise named Huckleberry.
A 5-day-old puppy, her eyes not yet open, was found beneath a collapsed building. She rested in an incubator in the shelter’s ICU until staffers found a foster home where she could recover.
Pasadena Humane is providing free boarding for pets with known owners for as long as needed, said Kevin McManus, a spokesman for the nonprofit shelter.
“We want people to not lose their homes and their family members,” McManus said of the pets. “We know that this is going to be a long, long journey.”
Under normal circumstances, the shelter keeps stray or unidentified animals for five days before putting them up for adoption. Animals that survived the fire, McManus said, will be held for at least 21 days while staff and volunteers try to track down their owners.
All adoptable animals that were there before the fire were moved — to shelters in Sacramento, Santa Barbara, San Diego and other cities — to make way for the fire refugees.
There have been so many donations of pet food, leashes, toys, crates, kitty litter and other supplies that Pasadena Humane had to borrow warehouse space to store it all, McManus said. What the shelter needs now, he added, are financial contributions, not supplies.
The day the winds whipped and the flames spread, the line of people dropping off their pets at the Pasadena shelter stretched around the block.
Those found in scorched areas had burns and cuts. They were dehydrated and short of breath, some with eyes crusted shut.
And they were traumatized.
The unidentified black and brown kitten in the ICU — known only as A519470 — sat in her crate, staring straight ahead, even as people bustled around the room.
When she first got there early this week, she tried to run away and hissed any time someone tried to touch her, Ortiz said. After a night of sleep, she awoke in good spirits and let medical staffers scratch her chin.
“Right now, we are feeling pretty optimistic because she’s eating, she’s drinking, she’s moving,” Ortiz said on Wednesday as she prepared to rub Manuka honey on the kitten’s burns to soothe the pain. “Some of our cats were not moving at all. We did lose some.”
Ortiz’s voice caught.
Last week, she helped care for Roxy, a 15-year-old poodle rescued from a collapsed house. The dog had severe burns, ulcers in her eyes and red, swollen gums from smoke inhalation. She struggled to breathe.
Roxy’s owner, Ortiz said, was an older man. When somebody called him after finding Roxy, he was confused.
“He said, ‘I’m sorry, my dog is white, not gray. I don’t think that’s my dog,’” Ortiz said.
It was Roxy. She was coated in ash.
“His house is completely gone,” Ortiz said. “And she’s 15 years old. And she managed to get out.”
The owner brought her to Pasadena Humane before heading to another city, where he had a place to stay.
Ortiz recalled that as he handed Roxy over, “he kind of didn’t want me to take her yet. He kind of wanted to hold on to her. But —”
Roxy was transferred to an emergency hospital. She died three days later.
Outside Pasadena Humane’s ICU, two big, gray dogs, believed to be cane corso mixes, shared a kennel and leaned into each other, looking up at passersby with doleful eyes. They were brought from an emergency veterinary hospital. In the fire zone, they had drunk vehicle coolant, probably because they were desperately thirsty.
“Now that they’re stable, they’re here, we expect that they’ll recover,” McManus said. “The next step is trying to figure out where they came from. Who they belong to.”
In another room, a 14-year-old tabby cat named Milo, dropped off by his owner on Jan. 7, poked his paw through his crate, wanting pets from Gaby Solingen, a volunteer. She smiled, saying he clearly got a lot of attention at home.
Solingen, who lives in Tarzana, had evacuated her parents from their home near Mulholland Drive when the Palisades fire got too close. It survived, but most of her friends’ did not. Her alma mater, Palisades Charter High School, was badly damaged.
She was volunteering at Pasadena Humane on Wednesday, she said, because it felt good to do something productive.
“I wanted to help,” she said. “I’ve just been sitting around, kind of grieving.”
That afternoon, Michael and Kimberly Guccione, a septuagenarian couple from Altadena, left the shelter carrying their 16-year-old cats, Nellie and Lili, in two soft crates.
The Gucciones dropped the cats off the night the fire started and stayed a week at a Red Cross shelter while waiting to be allowed back into their home, which survived. The cats would have been too skittish at the shelter, amid hundreds of people, and were well cared for at Pasadena Humane.
When reunited with their owners, they were exhausted and did not react much. But the Gucciones were happy, and relieved, to see them.
“They’re our family,” Kimberly Guccione said. “And we missed them terribly.”
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