Posted on 09/13/2007 3:27:45 PM PDT by Mr. Brightside
Aren't kitties the best :) I was just playing fetch with mine.
His family will not visit him and none of his friends will either. No one has an answer on how to help him. except for his neighbors which are calling every animal origination they can to clean up the place. They haven't been able to prove any animal cruelty yet but given time they will.
There are a number of organizations that does this free and in my area the city gives you two fixing's a year. the problem with that is it doesn't cover a litter of cats. There needs to be a way to deal with a whole litter.
A real nutcase horder with more then one screw loose. =^..^=
I hope a wider understanding of this phenomenon can help end it. I adore cats, but have never had more than 4 at a time, and never had one that went unfixed for more than a few days after arriving at my house. I’ve had a few neighborhood cats fixed without consulting their “owners” when they kept turning up in my yard.
My grandmother was sort of a cat-hoarder, though except for one or two that she kept in her apartment, the rest were in an old barn at a nearby summer farmhouse she’d enjoyed as a child and young adult. She went out there every day to feed them, spending money she couldn’t afford, and in her later years when she didn’t have a car, friends drove her there every day. This was in a small rural town in the midwest, and until the very latter years of this, there were no vets in the area that would treat dogs and cats (not that she had the money anyway). There were only farm animal vets. So she didn’t even have the option of getting them fixed before it got out of hand. Very late in her life, she was forced to sell the farm property to a developer, and had to have all but a couple of the cats put to sleep (the developer paid for that). Though she wasn’t as isolated as many of the cat hoarders, she was a lonely old woman, after most of her good friends and relatives had died and the rest had moved away. The cats were her closest companions and the only living creatures in the world who needed her.
You’re very right that these people need help, not jail. And for the most part, they don’t need mental hospitals or outpatient psych treatment either. They need people to care and to help in a concrete way, and in a lot of cases, those people would need to have authority to force things a bit while still leaving the hoarder mostly in control of her life, home, and cats. Once it’s gotten really bad, most of the hoarders are too embarrassed to let anyone into their home.
As it stands now, the only people who ever have the authority to go in and do anything without an invitation from the hoarder (which is simply never forthcoming), are people such as police, animal control officers, health officers, zoning officers, etc., who are under marching orders to bring the home into nearly instant compliance with all laws, and this invariably means confiscating all the cats, euthanizing most of them, and often forcing the hoarder to move to public housing or a poor quality assisted living facility. Nobody EVER comes to insist on taking the cats to be fixed a few at a time and bringing them back, to insist on helping set up an arrangement in the home under which a fairly large number of cats could be housed in better conditions for both the cats and the human, to insist on advertising some of the cats for adoption and screening the potential adopters to make sure they’ll provide good homes, to insist on helping clean up the house, etc.
If this sort of “insisting” were started when the problem was at the 20-40 cat level, the situation could be gotten under control, but that never seems to happen. Instead, we only hear about hordes of government agents descending on these places after there many dozens of cats or even hundreds, to haul out and euthanize the cats, haul out the traumatized human and force her to move, and demolish the house. It usually resembles a SWAT team more than helpful fellow citizens.
Also needs to be way to push the issue so as to really help before things get hopelessly out of hand (see my post above). Sounds like that what your 50-cat friend needs. A couple of friends or neighbors or relatives given authorization by a local court to go in take the cats a few at a time to be fixed and returned, even over the objections of the owner. Your friend’s situation sounds fairly typical: lots of people know something needs to be done, but nothing is likely to get done until it reaches a point where animal cruelty charges can be brought.
But just you wait...!
(I'm a sucker for a kitten.)
Usually hoarders have good hearts, but a mental illness of some sort. It's important to see that the animals are cared for. Let me know if you need my help!
Usually hoarders have good hearts, but a mental illness of some sort. It's important to see that the animals are cared for. Let me know if you need my help!
He takes about 3 cats a week to get them fixed through those organizations that do help. I honestly don't know how many cats he has I know it over 50.
He lives in Northridge. I am in Reseda. Sending you mail..
I've never heard of "Wheels on Meals". Is that a new name for "roadkill"?? lol!! ;^)
“Wheels on Meals”
LOL — a lysdexic moment!
Which is the answer to the problem of overpopulation with both dogs and cats.
The issue being cheap/free and readily available spaying and neutering.
Sounds good on paper, but it’s very very very rare, at least in my area.
Even the cheapest I could get for the dump-ees at my place was around $75 apiece, and that was at HALF PRICE with a coupon from PAWS. And still, I was only able to get a few of mine done at a time. So I had a new batch of kittens before I got the last female from the first batch spayed.
The vets insist on about a half dozen shots at $10 each, plus this fee and that fee, and suddenly a spay is over $150. And don’t get me started about what they want for a rabbit!!
Yes, I have a small herd of outdoor ‘barn’ cats with one who has decided he prefers my house to the storage building. Yes, I got all of mine fixed finally after a year of literally trapping cats and praying for no more kittens.
And yes, they are intimidated by the chickens.
But until a better, quicker and more logical solution comes along (like a spay/neuter pill that can be handed out FREE!!!!).
Lots of these poor folks are gonna be caught with a herd of cats that just started with one abandoned Mama.
Yes, but many people — especially many elderly women living alone — don’t usually have the cash on hand to get a pet fixed promptly. To get one of the low-cost or free deals offered by some local governments and animal welfare groups, you generally have to get a form, mail it in, get a coupon back, go to a participating vet. No doubt a lot can be done by Internet now, but the pet still needs to get to the vet, and many elderly people don’t have computers or Internet access. Many also don’t have cars and live in areas where public transportation is limited or non-existent, andmay have physical disability (mobility, vision, etc) that complicate the process. I did this once a long time ago, in basically per-Internet era, and it took a month, with no transportation issues and no disabilities, to get the job done. And if the pet is a stray that wandered in, it may already be pregnant, and the person is likely not to have a carrier (and a random cardboard box is an iffy way to confine a healthy young cat through a couple of bus or train rides and walking between those and the home and vet’s office).
That reminds me of my old cat...I don’t know how many window blinds I went through. I actually bought 2-3 at a time and stored them in the closet.
Oh, what we do for our pets!
Or if the animal is semi-feral and pregnant, you have to catch and/or trap.
I got one inside my house with the attitude that I’d ‘put’ her in the carrier. HA!
Did you know that a cat can find the hole in the boxspring cover under your bed? Did you know that they can wedge their bodies in the box springs and then lock their claws into the fabric?
Do you know how dang heavy a mattress and boxspring is to move by yourself?????
Or he SAYS he believes he doesn’t need help. Deep down he may know full well that he does, but pride can be an obstacle to admitting that. Since you say he’s regularly getting cats fixed, he doesn’t sound totally out of control, even if his home may be a disaster area. Sometimes we need to face the fact that other people’s values and priorities are different from ours, and it may be that he just really prefers to live in squalor and help as many cats as he can. It’s that pecky freedom thing :-) Given that he’s taking several cats a WEEK to be fixed, he sounds like he’s actually part of the solution, rather than part of the problem, unlike most of the people who have a filthy house full of cats, where they are almost all un-fixed and the person has no means to get any significant number of them fixed before they reproduce.
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