HELPING EXOTIC ANIMALS GET A LEG UP : ACTRESS STARTS CENTER TO TAKE CARE OF ABUSED, INJURE, AGING CREATURES.

Byline: Doug Willis Associated Press 

Each day starts with the same routine for Pat Derby: Hop out the back door of her yellow farmhouse to wash the elephants, soak their feet in apple cider vinegar and feed them a bucket of fruit and bagels.

The apple cider vinegar is treatment for the arthritis and other ailments suffered from decades standing in chains on hard concrete. The apples and oranges are their regular breakfast. The bagels are a special treat.

And the four elephants?

They are what the PAWS sanctuary is all about, along with the eight lions, four tigers, seven monkeys, six bears and two wolves - and the wallaby, the leopard, the bobcat, the baboon, the tamarin and the ostrich.

Derby, a former dancer, television actress and nightclub singer, is the founder and live-in manager of PAWS, the Performing Animal Welfare Society, which runs a sanctuary for abused, injured and aging exotic animals.

She founded PAWS to fight the mistreatment of animals in motion pictures, television, advertising and other entertainment mediums.

Today, a few animals at PAWS still come from Hollywood, including Lennie, a 28-year-old European brown bear who Derby says has a long list of Disney film credits, and Harriet, a baboon who is a veteran of network television.

But many more are discards from traveling animal shows or public or private zoos, including animals which outgrew petting zoos which raised them.

Derby says a handful of sanctuaries like hers around the country fill a need which zoos and other animal facilities can't fill.

``A zoo's mission is preservation of species. To preserve species, you don't take the lame, the old, the blind. You take the best specimens,'' she said.

Tammy and Annie, two Asian elephants who weigh 8,000 and 9,500 pounds respectively, are the newest and biggest residents of Derby's sanctuary, coming a year ago from the Milwaukee Zoo, which decided to get rid of them after the local Humane Society complained about their treatment in the zoo.

At PAWS, Tammy and Annie live on 1-1/2 acres with a 96,000-gallon wading pool, just across a service road from two African elephants.

Derby says she's been an animal lover since she was a small child. So when she got into show business, she naturally gravitated to jobs working with animals, such as ``Lassie'' television show.

She eventually married an animal trainer, and they formed their own business providing trained animals for television shows and commercials.

``I loved working with animals. That's what I wanted to do. But when animals are a business, animals suffer. You do what you have to do to get the shot,'' she said. ``I realized that all of this was wrong, and that I couldn't be doing it myself and saying it was bad. That's when I got out.''

She created her first sanctuary for about 20 animals from her former production company such as Christopher, a cougar featured in dozens of Lincoln-Mercury television commercials in the 1970s.

That first sanctuary, ``Howling Wolf Lodge,'' was near Leggett in the redwoods on California's north coast in the late 1970s.

But as Derby started working for animal protection laws, she found she had to often make the 500-mile round trip to the state Capitol in Sacramento to testify about her experiences with performing animals.

That prompted Derby and her partner, Ed Stewart, to move their sanctuary in 1985 to Galt, a rural community 25 miles south of the state Capitol, and to create PAWS.

``It used to be a dog kennel that was really loud, so the neighbors don't mind,'' Stewart said of the occasional roar of a lion or braying of an elephant on their 20-acre sanctuary tucked between a small dairy and scattered residences two miles east of busy Highway 99.

Derby saw her most important proposal, setting state standards for the humane care of captive wildlife, enacted into state law in 1986.

Since then, she has continued to work for other measures to protect performing animals, launching a campaign this month with actress Kim Basinger to ban elephants from traveling animal shows because of the severe space restrictions during travel.

And her sanctuary has continued to grow, despite her desire to keep it small.

``We're not aspiring to have a huge number of animals. Our main focus is on stopping the problem, rather than continually rescuing its victims. But you say you're not going to take any more animals, and a situation like this comes along,'' she said of Tammy and Annie, too big and too old for most zoos.

Derby says it costs about $350,000 a year to run PAWS, including salaries of 10 full- and part-time employees, plus the cost of building additional facilities when it accepts additional animals.

Most of that is financed by dues of $25 annually from about 15,000 PAWS members, a handful of bequests and a half-dozen or more fund-raising open house days when the sanctuary is open to the public.

``We're not open to the public on a regular basis. We don't want to become a zoo. We're a sanctuary, and the animals are here because they have to be. A zoo would defeat that purpose,'' she said.

The late Amanda Blake of ``Gunsmoke,'' was a close friend as well and an early celebrity fund-raiser for PAWS, and she lived the final two years before her 1989 death at the PAWS sanctuary.

Other celebrities still help with fund-raising, including Basinger, comedian Kevin Nealon of Saturday Night Live, singer Grace Slick, actors Alec Baldwin and Don Henley and St. Louis Cardinals Manager Tony LaRussa.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) Pat Derby, founder of Performing Animals Welfare Society, a Galt, Calif., sanctuary which cares for exotic beasts, pets Anne, a Siberian tiger.

(2) Elephants, 71, left, and Mara horse around.

Associated Press