Clutter or Hoarding?

By now, it seems like the entire country is obsessed with A&E's show "Hoarders". I know I LOVE IT!! It makes me feel so much better about my always-cluttered room because I know I could never, ever get to be that bad. The show makes you feel sorry for the people, but also angry.. especially when you see people hoarding cats. There are almost always dead cats in each house - we watched one last night featuring Vula from Kokomo, Indiana, who not only had 13 dead cats in her house, but everything (and I mean everything) was covered in feces.. yet she was in denial claiming the things weren't contaminated & she was blaming other people for the dead cats. It made me furious. I know that something up there in the mindset is probably not right, but in my eyes, that doesn't make it okay - especially when cats are dying. Even if you hate cats, (which I don't, but my boyfriend isn't fond of them & even he was upset) no living creature deserves that life.

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my experience with hoarding. A few years ago, I found out that the Humane Investigator I knew was working a hoarding case right near my own home, so I went and helped out. It turned out to be 5 minutes away and the lady had like 70 cats. They had to remove her from the house while we went in and tried to trap the animals, which also included an elderly dog that couldn't even move. We were able to adopt out some of the less-feral animals, but due to lack of funding, an un-cooperative shelter that the Humane Investigator was sponsored by, & the fact that not only were these cats completely feral, inbred and infected (one cat I trapped had an open wound the size of my fist on his neck), most of them had to be humanely euthanized.

I have such a strong passion for helping animals. I hope that when I become financially stable (because it WILL happen one day! I know it!) I definitely have plans to open up my own no-kill rescue, specializing in hoarding animals, hard to adopt animals, animals in high kill shelters.. okay, specializing in ALL animals from any situation! haha. I have years of experience doing it, working not only with shelters, but also driving down to New Orleans after Katrina & helping trap cats & training dogs.

Ok, well, if you have the stomach for it, here are the photos of the house I worked in. It has since been demolished (it could have never, ever been fixed) & the last I heard of the woman was that she was in a nursing home.
If you know anyone who is hoarding animals, I encourage you to contact a humane investigator or shelter. If you don't know who to contact, just tell me! I can definitely find out for you.

You can just click on each thumbnail to get a bigger picture - I don't want to gross anyone out if they don't want to see these pics!





*very graphic, I am sorry!!!*