Animal hoarding - crime or mental illness?

I go with illness. Unless the animals are chained, tied, or caged, they are able to escape and probably aren't any worse off than they would be as strays -- or they would still be strays. The animal hoarding ang the living in filth seem like symptoms of the same disease.

I gotta go with Freeduck. It has to be a mental illness.

I think in all hoarding cases that the animals are confined, FreeDuck, either indoors or behind fences.

I feed an endless parade of strays courtesy of the apartment building not far from my house (people move out and ditch their cats). The Ferral Cat Coilition make rounds, picks up the cats, spay and neuter them and then drop them back off and that helps a lot. Some of the cats that wander in have been around for years and they seem to be doing quite well - much better than the ones who are hoarded. From what I've read, animals rescued from hoarders are usually either too sick or too asocial to be adopted out.

I too agree that it is a mental illness. I think it's strange that these people are prosecuted as criminals.

With nearly a 100% recidivism rate I'd say punishment is not effective.

Oh ok, I didn't know that. Then I guess I say it's a mental illness with harmful consequences to the animals. Not sure where I come down on that. Should they be charged with the crime and the punishment be therapy? Should they be charged and punished without rehab? Should they be rehabbed and not charged? I just don't know.

I just read an article by the lawyer who prosecuted the Kittles' case here (the lady with the bus full of pets) and what he said made good sense.

He said that there are two main reasons to prosecute these and other animal cruelty cases as felonies:

One is that unless you do, the person can move to another state and start the whole thing over again. Kittles apparently had misdemenor convictions for the same thing in other states.

Secondly, almost all sexual psychopaths start out by abusing animals. By prosecuting such cases you can "red flag" potential problems.

That makes sense. It kind of seems like the only way to force treatment is to prosecute them for the crime. As long as the treatment is provided, I guess I don't much care how it comes about. I wouldn't want to see them tried and just fined or imprisoned without addressing the underlying illness.

i watched animal planet (way too late at night this weekend) and saw a florida animal cops. They busted a hoarder with 82 dogs and confiscated 78 of them (i think legally in fla you can have 4). The dogs were in such bad shape, some couldn't walk because their nails were so long, most were flea infested and had been sleeping in their own feces. there were two sets of puppies in the house and as they panned around the house, it appeared that there were at least two other sets of puppies in the making. the woman was not prosecuted as long as she was willing to give up the amount needed to take her back to the legal limit. and they checked up on her after that. apparently the media ran a story about it and over 40 dogs were adopted the first day they were available.

i go for mentally ill as well, but like freeduck said, sometimes the only way to get them treatment is to prosecute. They just told this woman they would keep checking up on her (randomly so she couldn't hide pets like she was when they were rounding them up) and as long as she had only 4, she was fine. that seems reasonable to me since no dogs were dead, no dogs were starving, they just needed more attention.

it was a much better story than the dog chained to a tree for 3 weeks in florida heat that finally succumbed...made me cry. now those people should be tied to a tree with no food and water and see how they do...

Boomerang - with respect, that is a false dichotomy.

Crime AND mental illness COMBINED are acknowledged under BOTH law and jurisprudence here and in most other countries - animal hoarding, pedophilia, torture (even murder) on "religious" grounds as has frequently happened in children's cases are all considered crimes even when the perpetrators are deemed to be legally insane.

P.S. I'm with Dragon on that last comment - getting tied to a tree in 90 degrees weather for 3 weeks with no water is what I would have liked to do to the people who did that to the unfortunate dog. To expedite matters I'd rather shoot them, though

I say both - obviously they are mentally ill to do something like that, however, does that allow them to not be held responsible. I would have to say to murder another human being is mentally ill also, but they still are held responsible for their actions. Under these circumstances I would not think that they should be considered legally insane.

That's a good point - it is both a crime and an aspect of mental illness.

But like the difference between this and chaining a dog up without food or water for three weeks there seems to be a huge difference with intent.

The hoarders seem to see themselves as rescuers of these animals and really think they're helping - they don't think about the real consequences of their actions.

Really, it's like we treat drunk drivers who kill someone different that we treat someone who intentially murders. Again, intent seems to be the deciding factor.

Crime? Mental disorder?

Either way something has to be done or the animals involved will suffer.

Interesting. We had our own local "cat lady" who made the newspaper headlines a couple of decades ago. She lived in a filthy, almost uninhabitable house surrounded by cats, cats, cats. Many people tried to help her, but she made it impossible for anyone to give her effective assistance even in the face of having her home condemned. And that's what eventually happened. Her house was declared a public nuisance and the city tore it down. I'm pretty sure this old lady had more than just a few screws loose.

I saw her many years ago at a local supermarket. She was wearing a drab winter coat and a large colorful scarf around her head with her unkempt gray wig hairs sticking out. She was slumped against a wall and the store personnel had called an ambulance. It was a pathetic sight.

I think it is a kind of depression myself, where one lets go of a lot of effort to keep up with daily life except to 'care' for animals, and then is overwhelmed but sees no way out of it - except that they do, I gather, start again. A kind of compulsion.

Not that I don't want them stopped. Is this a kind of ocd? a pre-alzheimers?
Sigh. There is something to be said for humane institutional care, and I am not talking about the dogs.
Tricky subject, on which I can see several sides.

Illness. J.A. Jance worked with this in one of her (fictional) Joanna Brady novels. She indicates hoarding can almost always be related to childhood sexual abuse. Fiction, it's the only resource I've got on the subject.

That's interesting, Roger.

They believe it is a form of OCD.

As dragon pointed out, people often line up to adopt these animals when things like this happen and I've often wondered why. The shelters are already full of animals -- if they were wanting a pet why didn't they just go adopt one? Maybe the animal shelter should go rent a house, set it up with some nut and a bunch of cats, go in a week later and "bust" them and thereby reduce the number of pets in the shelter.

The Tufts site has a lot of interesting information including that these hoarders often work in "the helping professions" like nurses, or at a vet's office, that sort of thing -- that unlike Debra's cat lady, you would never know that they had such a compulsion.

It does seem that they have some hole in their life that they fill up with animals. I have always had pets and I really think they are a vital part of my mental health but I can't even imagine what would lead someone to this.