Loving animals to death

Animal hoarders think they're helping their furry friends, but mostly they're just feeding their own twisted psyches.

By Chris Colin

Mar 8, 2002 | In December, police in Cooper City, Fla., found 67 dead kittens and cats in Audrey Weed's refrigerator, according to the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. More cats and a dog were running loose; litter boxes overflowed. Weed, a 50-year-old retired police officer, was charged with 92 misdemeanor counts of animal abandonment. Before the arrest, neighbors said, she would go around the neighborhood feeding all the animals she could find.

A month later, not far away in North Miami-Dade County, police acting on neighbors' tips swept four homes and confiscated 201 cats and dogs. In one house, 52 beagles were found without proper food and surrounded by feces. Near another home, 72 dogs and cats, plus chickens, waded in an open sewer line. The Miami Herald reported that healthier animals found in the raids -- around 90 -- could go up for adoption. The rest, presumably, would be destroyed.

We're at an interesting place with animal hoarders. We've seen photos of their squalor -- the local paper inevitably goes in and takes pictures of soiled carpets and piled garbage -- and we can guess what happens, ultimately, to most of those ailing cats, dogs, birds and reptiles. But for all the neglect and mistreatment we are exposed to, we also seem to find the hoarders' variety of dysfunction quirky, and in some cases funny. Rarely do we consider their condition as serious as, say, schizophrenia. We believe these people to be ill but also just plain eccentric; for every Audrey Weed, there's an entertaining Joan Byron-Marasek, the tiger collector of Susan Orlean's recent New Yorker profile. In 2002, sitcoms still make cat lady jokes.

A few people want to change that. Gary Patronek, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University, argues that animal hoarding represents a vastly misunderstood problem, one that goes far deeper than a few animal cruelty charges invite us to imagine. Despite the attention they now get from the mainstream media, animal hoarders are the focus of very little psychological research.

"For years it's been perceived as an animal welfare issue, and left for the shelters to handle by themselves," Patronek says. "The human [side of the problem] has been largely ignored."

Patronek and his group, the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium (HARC), coined the phrase "animal hoarding" in 1997. It was a watershed moment: There had always been cat ladies, and newspaper stories about them began to appear routinely a decade ago, but they were referred to, rather benignly, as collectors.

"That connoted nothing," says Patronek, who, as a veterinarian, has walked into homes putrid with rotting carcasses and urine-soaked floors. He says the behavior "is much more like the pathological hoarding of objects."

But there is no clinical diagnosis right now, says Patronek, despite a correlation with known pathologies such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. "We'd like to study it more," he says. "Is it a syndrome in and of itself? Probably not. But [one day] we might like it to be included as a warning sign [in psychological evaluation]."

"Perhaps the most prominent psychological feature of these individuals is that pets (and other possessions) become central to the hoarder's core identity," Patronek writes in Municipal Lawyer magazine. "The hoarder develops a strong need for control, and just the thought of losing an animal can produce an intense grief-like reaction. Preliminary HARC interviews also suggest that hoarders grew up in chaotic households, with inconsistent parenting, in which animals may have been the only stable feature."

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