Hoarding

Hey there!

In my last post, I talked a bit about animal neglect and abandonment, so I decided that I'm going to briefly discuss other forms of animal cruelty for those of us that may be new to this topic.

I chose animal hoarding to discuss next because it is a really common issue that cannot always be solved.


Animal Hoarding

Animal hoarding, according to The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium (HARC) is defined as

* Having more than the typical number of companion animals
* Failing to provide even minimal standards of nutrition, sanitation, shelter, and veterinary care, with this neglect often resulting in illness and death from starvation, spread of infectious disease, and untreated injury or medical condition
* Denial of the inability to provide this minimum care and the impact of that failure on the animals, the household, and human occupants of the dwelling
* Persistence, despite this failure, in accumulating and controlling animals.

Animal Planet has a show right now called "Confession: Animal Hoarders" that shows a lot of really clear cut examples of this form of inadvertent cruelty. What I have discovered from watching a few episodes is that most hoarders don't realize the effects their extreme desire to own pets may have on the creatures they love so much.

Hoarding clip

It shows Shelley, a woman with an intense love for cats (she owns 65 of them) and the issues she has in caring for all of them.


Unfortunately, many states do not have clear cut laws on how many animals are allowed in a household. According to the Animal Legal Defense Fund, there needs to be intended cruelty involved in the hoarding for any witnesses to take action.

I feel like this needs to change. In order to convict animal hoarders for the problems they are inducing in their household, to their pets, and in some cases, even their neighbors, laws need to be generated that state how many pets a household can ably care for and afford. However, I think this is a difficult thing to determine. There are people I know with 10 pets that are incredibly busy and still have time to care for all of their animals, but then there are others that own 2 pets and care barely manage either of them. I would like to discuss this in more context at our next meeting to see what sort of ideas we can come up with.