All my life, I took care of people. I felt needed but not loved or appreciated. The animals have filled a void inside me. I’m the only one who can love and care for these animals. I am saving them from a life on the streets.
–a woman with sixty-six cats, from the book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Thingsby Randy O. Frost & Gail Steketee
I was already enjoying this amazing book, written by pioneers in the field, but when I got to Chapter Six, Rescue, it had special meaning. A cured hoarder, a woman who was accomplished, attractive, and intelligent, found herself running through Manhattan in the middle of the night, desperate to escape the psychiatrist who had trapped her in a cat hoarding cult.
I’ve been accused of having a few screws loose myself, having an average of ten cats for years at a time. But hoarding situations really aren’t Cat Appreciators gone wild. Hoarders tend to be caught up in the acquisition arc, not the caring responsibilities, to the point where their animals are poorly cared for; and the hoarder is oblivious to that fact.
Less than 10% of hoarding cases are handled with cooperation from the perpetrator, and most have both rescuer and rescuees living in deplorable conditions. So I was surprised to discover how little is known about this condition. It is virtually un-studied.
But one clue can be found in the quote above: I’m the only one. This isn’t about the cats. It’s about the person who is desperate to find meaning and uniqueness in their life.
Just as compulsive shopper/hoarders have closets stuffed with clothes still with their price tags, animal hoarders love the sense of rescuing the animals. Afterwards, their high over, the animals can’t be let go of; this would undermine the hoarder’s sense of specialness and highlight their loss of control.
The woman described in the book got caught up in her psychiatrist’s cat hoarding cult because of a genuine desire to give to others. The very difficulties that led her to seek therapy in the first place made her unable to acquire the distance and perspective that would have let her evaluate the doctor’s views.
This group saw spaying and neutering as “animal cruelty and deprivation,” an attitude that made the doctor’s collection keep growing. They were cared for at first, with veterinarians on call and a license from the Health Department, since the doctor claimed the cats were part of her work.
But soon the acquisition became the point; not the caring. Acolytes were sent out into the streets to scoop up cats before the humane societies could, and the cats were kept in tiers of cages with little human contact. Patients began “rescuing” kittens by pulling them from the arms of strangers. As the numbers climbed into the hundreds, care was neglected, vet care became too expensive, and cats died by the score in epidemics of contagious diseases.
Patients had little time for anything but trying to keep up with the doctor’s dictates for cat handling, as they bartered their time as caretakers for more therapy sessions, and struggled to keep up with feeding and the constant flood of kittens.
Looking back on it, [she] now saw that many of her cats were suffering. “I was careless with them. I did the same thing to the animals that my mother did with me,” she said. She remembered one cat [of two hundred in her own home] dying because she was too tired from her shift at the doctor’s facility to give him his seizure medication.
Eventually, she became unemployed and homeless, and lost all her cats, along with all contact with her former therapist. Now retired to an apartment, having three cats, and no more, she looks back to say that she never enjoyed the hoarding, or actually felt love for all those cats.
With a number she can handle properly, she can finally feel the real connection she was longing for.
Animal hoarding is a mental illness, though it does not have its own diagnosis. As with hoarding in general, it’s considered to be an offshoot of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Ironically, animal hoarding can sometimes spring from genuine humanitarian impulses which are distorted by the underlying mental disease. This makes the sufferer unable to sort out the contradictions in what they claim they are doing, and how they are actually behaving.
It’s important for pet lovers to remember that these bizarre scenarios couldn’t be more different from the true Cat Appreciator situation; groups of happy cats who have been given proper care and training to be loving companions. I always correct people, joking or not, who bring up “hoarding” in the context of having more than one cat.
With either dogs or cats, society’s expectation that it’s fine to have a singular pet, and a bit strange to have more than one, runs counter to the fact that both dogs and cats are social creatures, and usually do better when they are not a “lonely only.”
I hope this sets some minds at ease.
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You never see a report on a cat hoarder that says “and all the animals were healthy and well cared for.” They’re always undernourished and sick, and there are always corpses in the freezer.
A few years ago, we had a case in my state. 75+ cats, all sickly. And because they were all fed table scraps rather than cat food, half were blind from thiamine deficiency. And the 2 women who kept these poor cats hostage cried when they took away their “babies.” They were blind themselves, thinking that their torture was love.
I agonized over getting a second cat, and years later, a third. If it’s not a very long and difficult decision, and carefully weighed, just keep waiting until you know you want another cat in your life. And that your cats would like another, too.
May I add: the number of pets you have should be exactly proportionate to the amount of attention you can give to each one. The amount should be equal, and it should be a LOT. For me, 3 is the magic number.
I couldn’t agree more, Bill. When the cats have enough of what they need, and so do the people, everyone is happy.
We once adopted two short-haired kittens from a hoarder who only collected long-haired cats. (She took two short-haired kittens in order to get two longhairs in the same litter.) I’ve never been in such horrible circumstances as we saw in that house. Frankly, the little girls could have been orange and pink striped; we had to remove them from the dozens of long-haired cats we saw there, many with crossed eyes, kinky tails, and other deformities (the owners were against neutering and spaying, intending, they planned to breed and sell their “valuable long-haired cats”).
Fortunately, dear Maggie and Thorfinn became the sweetest cats we’ve ever had, once they had some good nutrition and a lot of attention. They lived 15 and 16 years, pretty good, we thought, given their awful condition when we took them home.
I’ve known two hoarders who went on to get treatment. They were by no means pet lovers; they had very distorted views of the world and a strange mixture of guilt over abandoned pets plus blindness to their own neglect of their animals. A lot more study of people with these problems is needed, for certain. Other kinds of obsessive compulsive problems can be cured or at least managed; so can pet hoarding, I’m certain.
Stories about cat hoarding are so very difficult for me to read; they’re literally the stuff of nightmares, at least for me as I think about how those cats must feel kept in such deplorable, dirty, cramped conditions. I can understand wanting to HELP lots of cats, but I think that the “help” impulse can get very twisted in some people. As you note in the post, they make the whole thing about THEM, as opposed to about the cats and their well-being. The way I see it, helping cats does NOT imply all those cats need to live with ME (or any other singular person). That makes no sense at all.
I determined a while back that my home’s “cat-carrying capacity” was four and I have stuck to that number. If I brought in any more cats I am certain there would be serious territory issues — my older cat, Nikki, has come to tolerate the three younger ex-ferals that share the house with her, me, and my SO, but she (Nikki) goes absolutely livid if any neighbor cat dares to enter her yard.
Moreover, I don’t have anywhere else in the house I could reasonably put another litter box — everyone seems happy enough with the three-box arrangement currently in place (with each box in a different room or part of the house), and Nikki has outdoor access during the day, but even just one more cat would introduce all sorts of anxiety and disruption to the toilet situatio. And that is definitely one area I don’t want to stress my kitties in at all!
So in any case I have come to figure that when figuring out how many cats you can reasonably keep, it is VERY useful to consider how many litterboxes that means you will need, and to determine where you are going to put said boxes. And as far as helping cats you cannot feasibly adopt, of course you can always volunteer at a shelter or assist with Trap-Neuter-Return efforts for local feral cats (which I am helping my SO’s parents with as much as I can; I got them a humane trap recently and two girl kitties have been spayed, yay!).
AnneC´s last [type] ..On Barn Cats
We (a married couple) currently have 5 cats, from a high of 6 (one of our beloved Elder Cats died of cancer recently).This is 1-2 more cats than we were really planning for… but we adopted the 3 ferals from our shed (a momcat and her 2 surviving kits), and they are a joy. The kittens-that-were have become very affectionate, as has the momcat (but only with my husband thus far), and they all love the housecat lifestyle and have no interest in their previous “freedom”.
I adore the Things (what I call the 2 surviving kittens-that-were), and they adore me back. Gigi (the momcat) adores my husband and also Heidi (one of the Things).
All have been spayed, neutered, and vaccinated… although they’re due again, and I’m not looking forward to the process.