Thanks very much for your very interesting and informative post.
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.