Know Any Pet Owner Hoarders

Pet owner, pet hoarders, are not your average pet keepers. They generally try to save all stay cats and dogs, regardless of their living arrangements or ability to pay for the feed.

Soon their houses are filled with 30 or more animals. The dogs are barking and if let out use the neighbors lawns for their potty. The litter boxes are over run and the neighbors are complaining about the noise and smell.

Family members are disgusted and stop coming over to the house. Sometimes homes are found for a few, but more are brought in. And both the animals and the hoarder suffer from lack of air quality and sanitary conditions.

I know of someone who has 35 cats in the house and 26 in the garage. They have kitty poo, in the house and everywhere and friends and family, avoid going to their home. They are linked with the local animal rescue, which from the way their house is I doubt, the animal rescue has ever visited the home.

While these folks are generally very caring animal lovers and want to care for all these animals, they seem unaware of their own health concerns.

Do you know any pet hoarders? How do you feel about this way of trying to save animals? Please share here.

Hoarding is not in any way a suitable rescue situation. Sad to say the poor animals often end up in worse condition than if they had not been 'rescued' and any rescue organisation that relies on a hoarder to house rescued animals is senseless. Not only do the animals suffer but the mental and phisical health of the hoarder is bound to suffer not to mention neighbours and friends of the hoarder

(03-03-2013, 09:04 PM)suzjbibby Wrote: Hoarding is not in any way a suitable rescue situation. Sad to say the poor animals often end up in worse condition than if they had not been 'rescued' and any rescue organisation that relies on a hoarder to house rescued animals is senseless. Not only do the animals suffer but the mental and phisical health of the hoarder is bound to suffer not to mention neighbours and friends of the hoarder

Yes, this is very true. I know some people who only have 3 pets and a young child in the household and it is already a 24/7 hour job and it is extremely hard to keep up with everyone. They have a bunny who needs to be changed everyday and a puppy who needs a bath regularly. I can't imagine people who have 10 pets because they just can't take care of them properly.
This makes me angry and frustrated but most of all sad because the animals may be in worse conditions compared to if they were in a shelter as you have previously mentioned.

I talked to a friend, last month, and she was telling me about a person she knew (in FL) that again was involoved with animal rescue and had her trailer loaded with cats in cages and finally build cages in her back yard to house even more animals.

She was begging people for cat food donations and money to pay vet bills.

I love all animals, but trying to save every stray cat is usually a lost cause and the animal though fed still suffers from lack of personal attention and medical needs.

I heard yesterday, that animal control had to come and take the cats because the woman was starting to have serious health issues brought on by trying to care for over 100 cats at her home.

We have an old lady in our neighborhood that keeps bringing home stray cats. The lot next to her is vacant so she fashioned a shed of sorts in one corner of the lot that is hidden by trees. She feeds the cats there sometimes once or twice a day according to her closest neighbors. The cats are not in her house so its not filthy but now we have around 30 stray cats running around the neighborhood. It's getting really hard to walk my dog around the streets without her barking at all the stray cats. We've called the animal shelter and they've taken some of the cats but our neighbor keeps bringing new cats back to the neighborhood.

I don't personally know of any pet hoarders, no... but I keep seeing news articles of people being warned, and sometimes even arrested for having too many animals in the house or on their property. While I understand the love of pets and wanting to "help" every animal that seems to need help, there's a definite line that shouldn't be crossed and I think the hoarders cross it. Not sure where that line is, but I'd think that once it becomes a difficulty to pay for their food and vet care would be a pretty good indicator of where the line is. Like others have said here, there's a point where doing things like this ends up hurting the animals instead of helping them which was the original intention.

Unfortunately, I have known a cat hoarder. My little sisters (age 9, back then) told me they had a neighbor who had, in their words, "like 90 cats!!!" Being imaginative 9 year olds, I thought they were exaggerating and the real numbers were around 5-6. I asked their (adoptive) mother about it, who told me that the woman has about 30 in the house and even more are "outside cats". She said that the entire neighborhood thought it was so funny because she dumps an entire bag of cat food on the ground and then rings a bell when it's dinnertime and all 40+ cats who live in the small area around her home come running to get their dinner. Everyone in the neighborhood thinks it's so funny to see a herd of cats running at the sound of a bell, and they just call her "the crazy cat lady". She said that a few of the cats are run over every year because people speed down their 'country road'... I visited and saw what was up for myself... cats were fighting over the food, many had injuries or an extreme amount of fleas, and most of them were not neutered or spayed. I couldn't believe that an entire neighborhood knew about this situation and thought it was funny and cute. My local animal shelter intervened, eventually.
I think in recent years, animal hoarding has been in the media quite a bit and so maybe one of the neighbors would have spoken up, had it been a little bit more recent... but it really concerns me that such a large group of people were so ignorant of the problem.

I have never known any animal hoarders, and I'm happy about it. I can easily imagine how someone would get in that situations. Sometimes you can come across animals and just know that they will probably die if you don't help them. A few boxes of unwanted kittens that you didn't manage to get homes for, and you have a problem. I imagine that most of the hoarders are just well meaning people who got into a problem they don't know how to solve. Luckily, today is easier to help animals, with different animal shelters you can get in touch with online, lots of adoption sites, social media networks... I'm really hoping that these things will solve the hoarding problem, since it's easier to help those animals as well as those people. I have heard of a few hoarding examples that ended well, with the hoarders getting enough donations to open a shelter. These stories happened in places where animals rights are very low and shelters are few.

It is really sad that some people become pet hoarders. I truly believe that most of these people love their pets very, very much, and are heartbroken if and when the pets are taken away by the Humane Society. Most of them start out with just a few pets, and then the cats have kittens, or dogs have puppies; and once that cycle starts, it is hard to stop it.
My son had a girlfriend that became a hoarder. For a long time, she just had her one pet cat, but then she acquired a pair of cats, and soon there were kittens. She loved the kittens, and didn't have any other family; so she couldn't bear to give them away.
Eventually, those cats grew up and had kittens, strays wandered in since there were already a lot of cats there, and she had put out several cat food dishes outside, plus more inside. The cats increased at an even faster rate; and she was still not willing to part with them, and by now, had so many that she couldn't afford to have them neutered.
Sadly, she also contracted cancer, died, and the county Humane Society had to deal with the cats. Many of them were not healthy, and had to be put to sleep.
The whole thing was terrible; but there was no way to stop her once she got so many cats, and became a hoarder.