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Your values are expressed through the choices you make. This is the tagline I chose for my website almost 20 years ago when I decided to shift the focus of my animal welfare advocacy from creating videos to help nonprofit groups to creating a platform to try to help other people like me - people who care about companion animals but may not be well versed in issues that affect them. That tagline guides my decisions to this day as I ask myself what I value. It is in the spirit of this self-reflection that I have chosen to leave Facebook despite the following I developed there over many years. Social media can be a great thing. Social media can be a terrible thing. I originally created a presence on Facebook as a way to reach a larger audience and lead people to my website. Some of my posts reached hundreds of thousands of people and I would like to believe I at least caused them to think and at best encouraged them to become advocates themselves related to what is happening regarding companion animals where the live, work and play. Facebook was It was a great tool for many years. Until it wasn't. With the passage of time and changes to algorithms and advertising by Meta, I no longer reached the same audience I once did. Like most people, my news feed was full of reels, ads and recommendations. I was tagged dozens of times a day about animals in need and was often called upon to defend my support of the No Kill movement which has changed our society to save the lives of millions of shelter animals each year, but which is painted in a negative light by those who have not taken the time to educate themselves about history. There were times I could reach people and help them learn something new. There were more times I could not. I ultimately was on the receiving end of profanity-filled rants, name calling and veiled threats. Which meant it was time to go. I have left Facebook completely. If you find yourself with mixed feelings about that platform, I encourage you to consider what value it brings to your life compared to how much it affects you negatively. If you find yourself checking Facebook not only daily but multiple times a day, the addictive nature of the platform is likely not good for your mental health and that can ultimately affect your physical health over time. When I made my decision, I was reminded of the iconic line spoken by Morgan Freeman in the movie The Shawshank Redemption: "it's time to get busy livin' or get busy dying." I choose to get busy livin'.  You are welcome to subscribe to my Paws4Change blog if you don't already. I blog not to make myself relevant, but when I feel I have something valuable to share. I do not use AI when I write like some do to create "clickbait" or create controversy. I make no money off of my advocacy and my focus is on awareness and education. If I learn something I think may be of value to others, or I feel the need to reinforce information I have shared before, I blog. I can also be found on Instagram as Paws4Change Official (since I hold a trademark on the name). I realize Instagram is also a Meta product. Most of my family is active there so it allows me to keep up with their lives and adventures. It also allows me to continue my Paws4Change outreach beyond my website but using a platform I find easier to control and navigate. If you have a topic about which you would like me to blog, reach out so we can chat. I am also open to creating short videos to promote organizations that function consistent with my values. That was how my advocacy began and I still have access to copyright cleared music that comes in handy. As we head into the holiday season, I wish all of you the best and thank you for your years of support. The hardest lesson we learn from losing those we love is that what we value most - or regret most - at the end of our lives is time. Time spent. Time not spent. Time wasted. I hope as you look to the new year you will focus on being more present in your life with your family, with your friends and with your animal companions as you focus on your choices reflecting your values. Let go of things that bring you down and get busy livin'.  "Surrender" courtesy of Fisher from their album "The Lovely Years"
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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. NOTE FOR CONTEXT: There are many times people refer to someone having a large number of animals as "hoarders" or "collectors" when that is not always the case. Just like a dog running loose is not always an abandoned animal, not all large groups of animals are owned by hoarders. People can get overwhelmed when they can't afford spay neuter, they are afraid the local shelter will kill animals and they are judged harshly. Community outreach to help people - while suspending judgement - is incredibly important and can also identify potential hoarders. It's much more nuanced than people realize. Some situations can be resolved by helping to place puppies and having the adult animals spayed and neutered to prevent further litters. 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:
How to Spot an Animal Hoarder The following are red flags that someone in your life may be collecting or hoarding animals:
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.
 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. |
AuthorI am an animal welfare advocate. My goal is to help people understand some basic issues related to companion animals in America. Awareness leads to education leads to action leads to change. Categories
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image courtesy of Terrah Johnson
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