City Lights:

There’s a brilliant documentary from the 1970s called “Gates of Heaven” about people who run pet cemeteries in California.

The movie starts out focusing on a hopeful entrepreneur who creates a graveyard out of love for animals, then watches his business crumble. The dead pets from his graves are dug up and transported to another pet cemetery up north, which is run by people who seem far more detached from the lives of cats and dogs — but have quite a bit more business savvy and succeed in keeping the pets underground.

It’s a film with many subtle truths, and one of them is that caring for animals, like most everything else in the world, ultimately comes down to logistics. Many of the people who voted for Proposition 2 last year were undoubtedly vegans or vegetarians who would prefer to spare farm animals altogether, but their only option was to vote for a measure that would make battery cages a little wider. And even farm sanctuaries, which give a permanent home to animals rescued from the slaughterhouse, can only take so many in.

That’s the dilemma faced by Second Chance Pet Adoptions, a Huntington Beach-based nonprofit that takes in stray or abandoned cats and places them in permanent homes. The agency’s phone rings multiple times a day, but even with about two dozen cats being adopted out each month, it still has to turn dozens more away due to lack of funds and space.

Monday afternoon, I visited one of the nonprofit’s locations at Petco in Huntington Beach. In a row of cages near the front of the store, Second Chance volunteers display cats and kittens along with posted notes giving each one’s name, history and personality. Of the about 100 cats in the nonprofit’s care, some are housed at Petco and PetSmart, with the majority in foster homes. Fifty more, which owners are looking to relinquish, are on a waiting list.

Suzy Swancutt, a member of Second Chance’s board of directors, said it takes only a few days to determine a cat’s personality.

According to the notes on the cages, some love dogs; some are shy around other cats; some enjoy being walked on a leash. I once had a conversation with someone who said she couldn’t understand why anyone cared about animal rights. “They’re just animals,” she said, screwing up her face incredulously. But just a quick perusal around the cages at Petco serves as proof that every animal is unique.

The volunteers who run Second Chance would like to save as many cats as possible — some of the members of their menagerie were abandoned in dumpsters, left in duct-taped plastic containers or found behind nightclubs.

But that’s where logistics come in again. Even many cat lovers can’t adopt one for a number of reasons — allergies, economics, apartment rules — which means the waiting list at agencies like Second Chance continues to grow.

Still, a few saved is better than none at all. One of the cats at Petco is a mother who was found hiding in a family’s doghouse with seven 2-day-old kittens. The family called Second Chance, which took in the batch and has now placed five of the kittens in adoptive homes.

To a cat who started life in a stranger’s yard, it must seem like a remarkable place to end up.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com .