Animal Hoarding: A Hidden Illness
By: Stephania Munson
Most of us are familiar with the town’s ‘cat lady’ – often an elderly woman who lives alone and is discovered to own dozens of cats. The more extreme cases appear in the newspaper, or on the evening news. Sometimes a neighbor complains to officials about the stench emanating from the woman’s house, or filthy feeding bowls and trash accumulating in the yard.
Animal hoarding is only one type of hoarding, or ‘collecting’. In the human services field, some homes are known as ‘garbage houses’. If you’ve never had occasion to enter such a home, it would be hard for you to imagine the enormity of the squalor to be found. Sometimes the hoarding of animals and of worthless objects and trash (such as 20 years of mildewed newspapers stacked to the ceiling) go hand-in-hand.
Frequently the reason someone loses control of his or her environment so completely can be learned, traced back to a sad crisis – a husband’s death, unemployment, a prolonged illness. The person simply loses the ability to cope.
Gary Patronek, Director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University, says that animal hoarding is ‘much like the pathological hoarding of objects…The animals become central to the hoarder’s core identity.’ Some psychologists have related hoarding to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
A definite profile of a typical animal hoarder has been developed:
· 76% are women
· 85% are middle aged, and 46% over age 60
· 50% live alone
· In 80% of the cases, animals are found dead, or seriously neglected.
· Homes are often in filthy, life-threatening condition. Plumbing may be non-functional, electricity and heat turned off or disconnected.
Hoarding is an actual medical condition, a psychiatric illness. Over 2,000 cases of animal hoarding are reported in the United States annually – the actual number of cases may be much higher.
As we know, domesticated animals can’t take care of themselves. Living creatures need water even more than food. And house pets need love and attention, even if residing primarily in a fenced-in back yard.
The lesson here is, it’s not so much the number of animals you keep, but whether you can properly care for them – with time, attention, food, and veterinary care.
For more on animal hoarding please visit this website:
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p000425.html
Stephania edits a twice-monthly HTML ezine, Tidbits from the
Pantry, that is currently sent to more than 11,000 opt-in
subscribers. She recently retired after 40 years in the field of human services, and offers a free evaluation of a life problem to any subscriber by email.