pet connection

When I first started writing about pets a couple of decades ago, both the general public and the media had the wrong idea about “hoarders” — people who take in all the pets they can find, with the stated interest of “saving” them. The general public frequently sided with the hoarders because of the good intentions involved, and media often seemed to reflect the view that humane authorities were persecuting kind-hearted people.

Perhaps it’s the Internet that has changed things as much as anything else, since we are now able to better see hoarders not as an isolated, local phenomenon but rather as a mental health issue that’s actually surprisingly widespread. This case in New Hampshire is pretty ordinary in that it involves cats, and a little out of the norm, in that the hoarder is a man (most are women):

A month after she started gathering scores of cats from a Milford barn where they had been collected in a “pet hoarding” situation, the investigator for the Animal Rescue League is still at it.

“If someone created the worst place to hide cats, this would be it. It’s just full of great hiding places,” Maureen Prendergast [animal cruelty investigator for the Animal Rescue League of New Hampshire] said Thursday as she described days of searching under wooden pallets or through old military vehicles stored in the barn.

[...]

Prendergast said she regularly sees situations where people have 40 or 50 animals, but numbers as high as she has found in Milford are unusual. [...] Prendergast was called in and started removing cats and kittens, a job she has continued all month. The building still hold cats, though: She trapped 13 more last week.

“By the time we’re done, I think there will be well over 100,” she said. “Every time I go there, I see a new group.”

Tufts University has put online the definitive collection of Web resources on hoarding. Greater awareness of the problem helps authorities to stop someone before the situation becomes dire for the animals involved — and for the animal control, humane groups and volunteers that step in to help.

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