Geraldine Gilliland — native of Belfast, Ireland, longtime Malibu resident, chef and owner of two Santa Monica restaurants (Lula Cocina Mexicana and Finn McCool’s Irish Pub) — has another major passion in her life besides food: dog rescues.
Over the past 20 years, Gilliland has taken in a countless number of dogs. The canines live on her 250-acre Rancho Chiquita, located just outside the Malibu city limits, which she also uses as a place to host various fundraising events.
Gilliland’s rescues are mostly “dogs on death row” from Los Angeles and San Bernardino county animal shelters that are about to be euthanized. She often receives urgent pleas from volunteers at the shelters when a favorite dog is about to be put down.
“I’ll get an email with a photo and a sad story,” she said.
One dog Gilliland rescued was a 12-year-old named Daisy who had never been spayed, had a pre-cancerous tumor and some bad teeth. Her vet bill came to $1,200.
“Pets are often surrendered to the shelters when they develop medical problems and the owners can’t afford treatment,” she said.
Another time, Gilliland got a puppy with a “smashed back leg” that the vet wanted to amputate, but she insisted they save the leg, and the vet did.
Mattie, a beagle, was one of 27 starving hunting dogs that were “rescued from a horrible situation,” Gilliland recounted.
When the cost of care and feeding for so many dogs at Rancho Chiquita became prohibitive, Gilliland formed the nonprofit organization “Chiquita’s Friends” in 2011 in order to take in donations. Gilliland herself is the “Chiquita.” The Rancho’s facilities were often filled to capacity with dogs, and she began looking for some way to expand.
“I realized that I could put a new sanctuary building here, but it would just be too expensive to put in more roads and get all the required permits,” she said in an interview.
“I happened to go to Paso Robles to give a cooking class, and found out you can buy big parcels of land there relatively cheap compared to Malibu,” Gilliland explained. While deciding whether to buy property in that area to expand her dog rescue, she met Charlotte Meade, president and founder of “Meade Canine Rescue,” based near Atascadero.
Meade’s slogan is “giving old dogs new lives.” With locations in both California and Connecticut, she focuses almost exclusively on senior and/or special needs dogs that she receives from all over the state. “Animal Control considers a dog seven years old a senior,” Meade explained, which means they’re given much less time at the shelters before being euthanized.
Among the current 58 dogs and two cats at her sanctuary are animals with cancer and some that are blind. “Ones that are much less likely to be adopted by anyone,” Gilliland said. “We do a lot of vet and dental care, and a lot of spay and neuter.”
According to Gilliland, “One unsprayed female dog and her offspring could give birth to 67,000 dogs in six years.” That’s why spay and neuter is so important — it cuts down the number of dogs that end up at shelters.
When Gilliland and Meade met, they decided to combine forces and make Gilliland’s expansion plans a joint effort.
“Charlotte already had water, electricity, houses and barns on 12 acres,” Gilliland noted. So, they decided that if Gilliland could raise the money to turn an old barn on the property into a place for rescued dogs, then she could use it to expand her rescue operation — that would be Phase 1. Architectural drawings of the barn show all of the special beds and sleeping quarters they plan to construct.
Phase 2 would be working together to build an informational center about spaying and neutering pets, a mobile spay/neuter service and educating people about the euthanasia rates at shelters. According to the LA Times, close to 50 percent of the 72,000 animals brought to the six LA County shelters were killed by lethal injection last year, while the City of LA had a 26 percent euthanasia rate.
“We’ll be able to save hundreds of dogs a year” with the new facility, Gilliland said. “We’ll have an adoption coordinator to find forever homes for them.”
The fundraising effort to fix up the barn is now actively underway with a goal of raising $20,000 from the public, which Gilliland promises to match dollar for dollar, for a total of $40,000.
