Animal Hoarding: Cruelty and Crisis (Revisited)

I wrote a blog about a month ago about the relationship between animal hoarding and mental health issues that was prompted by realizations about a contact of mine who was found to having dying animals inside her home.  I interacted with her family following the suicide of her husband and her death. After learning more about the situation inside the home, I chose to delete the blog and save the topic for another day. This was done primarily out of respect to her family. I told her son I would revisit the issue later and that time has come. I don't expect you to read my blog and agree with me completely. My hope is that you will suspend your judgment long enough to learn something that may serve you well in the future or even help you prevent animal suffering and abuse.

Not a week goes by that we don't hear about an animal hoarding situation in some form. Local tragedies have ranged from hundreds of dogs found inside the home of an elderly couple, many of which were dead, to a woman who was found to have dozens of animals on her rural property, many of which were dead or dying. If you search for the phrase "animal hoarding" you will find a litany of news stories from across the country which describe horrific situations which shock the senses. Some cases result in criminal prosecution. Many do not. What the cases have in common is a person or people who have more animals than they can reasonably care for who end up neglecting or abusing those animals leading to suffering and often death.

My initial reaction to these situations is the same as most people. The information is disturbing, heart breaking and infuriating all at the same time. How can we not be angry about a situation so out of hand that people and animals live in filth and animals are left to die? How could they be so heartless and care so little for their companion animals? Why didn't they reach out for help?  I still have the same initial reaction as I would have had years ago as my focus is on the suffering and death of helpless animals. After almost two decades of animal welfare advocacy, however, my next thoughts look a little deeper to examine the "why" and the "how."
 
I now know these situations for what they are: animal hoarding. When people think of animal hoarding they think of dozens of animals inside a house, perhaps even dead animals inside a freezer. The number of animals is really not important. The complete lack of care for them, despite the best of intentions, is the key. Mental health experts have studied this phenomenon extensively. What at first looks like a criminal act created by intent really is not and the underlying reasons are quite often the opposite.

What is Animal Hoarding?

This article in Psychology Today explains animal hoarding this way:

• Animal hoarding can be identified when a person is housing more animals than they can adequately and appropriately care for," says Anne B. Pagano, executive director of the Hoarding Disorder Resource and Training Group, Inc. "It is a complex issue that often encompasses mental health, animal welfare, and public safety concerns."
• Also known as "Noah's Syndrome," animal hoarding is defined by an inability to provide even minimal standards of nutrition, sanitation, shelter, and veterinary care. Left to fend for themselves, hoarded animals may breed together, suffer starvation, fall ill, or die.
• From a clinical perspective, animal hoarding is considered a compulsive spectrum disorder and a type of hoarding, as detailed in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition).
• Most individuals who hoard animals are women over 50 years of age.
  

One of the most concise articles on the subject of animal hoarding is on the website for the Anxiety & Depression Association of America which explains the following:

• Animal hoarders have problems with acquiring animals and handling, managing, and getting rid of them. They have every intention of caring for the animals, but their difficulties with organization, attention, and focus contribute to their living spaces becoming very messy with animal waste and clutter.
• Hoarders also have an intense emotional attachment to their animals. They avoid the pain of letting go of things that seem very special, even when clutter prevents comfortable living. Like object hoarders, animal hoarders believe that things should be saved for some special event, even if the event never happens. They imagine the wonderful way in which they will heal love, and nurture their pets, while overlooking the terrible effects of having too many of them.
• Studies of animal hoarders show that their behavior often begins after an illness, disability or death of a significant other, or other difficult life event. They view their animals as a major source of love, and they emphasize how much they give and receive from them. For many, keeping their animals appears to guarantee a conflict-free relationship. They often refer to their animals as their babies, and they confuse their loving the animals with the reality of their inability to provide a safe, clean, and healthy home for them.
• Many see themselves as a rescue service for animals that others reject, giving them a role as a person who saves unwanted animals, which helps them feel special, loved, and important. So they feel unable to give up their animals for adoption because they believe no one else will provide their intense love for them
• Everyone suffers with animal hoarding - the animals, the hoarder, and those who love the hoarder. Hoarders frequently neglect their own health, nutrition, and social life because they spend all their time, money, and energy caring for their animals. They are emotionally overwhelmed and trapped by their indecision and sense of responsibility and are often sleep-deprived. Their homes are overcome by animal waste, and they can suffer health problems created by inhalation of ammonia, fleas and tics, and animal-borne illnesses.
• The animals suffer the same fate: poor health, malnutrition, disease, and even death. They are stressed by frequent fights over food; territory, or mating in crowded conditions and usually are not spayed or neutered. Hoarded animals can't retreat when they feel stressed or threatened, which is natural behavior for pets living in healthy homes or in the wild. All hoarding leads to a sad outcome, but the saddest of all is the animals who die in an environment of neglect, filth, and stressful overcrowding as innocent prisoners of well-intentioned but misguided love. These animals are innocent victims, enduring tragic lives with people who are equally trapped.

How to Spot an Animal Hoarder

The following are red flags that someone in your life may be collecting or hoarding animals:

• refusal to let you enter their home;
• continuing to acquire animals for which you know they lack the resources to properly care;
• failing to provide minimal nutrition, veterinary care, shelter or sanitation;
  
• refusal to accept help caring for animals;
  
• refusal to surrender animals to rescue groups, family or friends despite a complete inability to meet their needs;
  
• failing to recognize the devastating impact of this neglect and
• inability to stop from repeating this behavior.

What You Can Do to Help

If you genuinely believe someone you know is an animal hoarder, whether you are related to them or not, take action to try to prevent the situation from getting worse.

• Contact your local humane society, police department, or animal control department.
• Contact social service groups near you. Your local department of the aging, adult protective services, health departments and other mental health agencies may be able to provide help.
• Provide reassurance to the hoarder and make them aware their animals require urgent care. Communicate that immediate action is critical to their health and well-being.
• Remember that hoarding is almost always linked to mental illness, not intentional cruelty. Approach potential hoarders with empathy and compassion, rather than judgment. The most effective interventions require strong support from family, friends, and the community.
  
• If you are in the animal rescue or animal welfare community, please take time to learn about how mental health issues affect how people care for their animals or fail to care for them. Animal hoarding is a real mental condition about which you need to know if you really want to help animals and help the people who love them even if you do not approve of their behavior because you do not understand it.
• If you are in the animal sheltering community, please do not use the threat of euthanasia as a tactic to get animals our of your shelter. You can convey the urgency of placing animals and implore the public to help by adopting, fostering and volunteering without causing people to make desperate and often poor decisions related to shelter animals to keep them from being needlessly destroyed. This tactic of "crying wolf" may work for shelters from time to time, but there are consequences to the language you use when you communicate with the public. Learn about the No Kill Equation to help reform your animal shelter with the help of your community and without having to resort to threats.

The Response

When I first learned about the abuse and neglect of animals by my local contact, I openly said that I thought there were mental health issues involved. I later learned there were also issues regarding spousal abuse which contributed to the totality of the situation. This was a tragedy compounded by tragedy compounded by suffering and abuse. I ultimately lost long-term contacts when I shared my opinion about mental health problems being the cause of the situation and when I wrote that it made perfect sense in hindsight that my contact was extremely critical of the local animal shelter. The local shelter did not cause her to be a hoarder. It just made sense that she felt so strongly about the shelter ending the lives of healthy and treatable animals while she felt she was doing all she could to keep her own animals alive.

I am always shocked at how much people in the rescue community advocate for compassion toward animals while having none toward people. There are some who are active in animal rescue (but certainly not all) who carry an immense amount of loathing for people in general which is just below the surface of their functioning. Of course animals suffer and die at the hands of hoarders as the hoarders suffer themselves. As much as the torch and pitchfork crowd may want hoarders to pay severely for their crimes, that does not always happen. As is explained by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, "animal hoarding cases are difficult to prosecute [because] most states have no legal definition for animal hoarding, courts already assign relatively low priority to animal abuse and neglect cases in general, and many people are unfamiliar with the severity of abuse in hoarding situations."

There is a lesson so many in the animal sheltering and rescue community still have not learned: animal problems are people problems.

As terrible as hoarding situations are, they do provide an opportunity for change and to bring good from tragic. I encourage the stakeholders in the animal sheltering, welfare and rescue community in an area in which a hoarding situation is found to examine this issue from a place of compassion and to try to prevent it from happening again. There are some communities that have created a Hoarding Task Force to help address potential hoarding situations using the expertise of mental health professionals, law enforcement professionals and members of the animal sheltering and rescue community. This approach is akin to a shift in some law enforcement agencies from treating every law enforcement encounter with the pubic as a criminal matter and instead using mental health liaisons to resolve situations to avoid arrest, incarceration and prosecution.

Reference Links:
Anxiety and Depression Association of America: Animal Hoarding
Psychology Today: How Pet Owners Cross the Line to Become Animal Hoarders
ASPCA:  Animal Hoarding
Animal Legal Defense Fund Animal Hoarding Facts
Animal Humane Society: Animal Hoarding