Stuff

by Gail Steketee

  By the time she reached her thirty-sixth birthday, her collection had grown to thirty-five cats, and it had begun taking over her life. Her career was still thriving, but the parties and the men no longer interested her. The Doctor encouraged her to find a larger place to accommodate her cats. She settled on a sixteen-room house in Queens in a block where several of the Doctor's other cat hoarding patients lived. By this time people had learned that Pamela rescued cats and began leaving them on her doorstep, a common occurrence for animal hoarders. She also seemed to attract pregnant cats. Pamela and others in the Doctor's cult shared the belief that they had the ability to understand and communicate with cats in ways that other people could not and that cats understood them and their mission.

  Out of Control

  At this time, the Doctor began to depend on Pamela and her other patients to care for her own growing herd of cats, which now topped six hundred. At first Pamela worked for her in exchange for the therapy she was receiving. As time went by, her therapy and her own career seemed to give way to caring for the Doctor's cats, and before long she seldom spoke with the Doctor about her own problems. The Doctor's relationship with her patients shifted as the demands of her cats began to overwhelm her. No longer were her patients the center of her attention; all her energy—and that of her patients—centered on caring for and protecting cats. They protested at cat shows and shelters. They spoke out against the neutering of cats and rescued any they found on the streets. Pamela even recounted physically confronting a drunken man over the kitten he was carrying: she pulled it from his arms and leapt into a taxi, which sped away as the man sprawled on the hood of the car to stop them. Patients who did not participate in these kind of activities began drifting away.

  None of the patients who stayed would have dared to neuter any of their animals. To do so would have meant certain banishment. Lesser transgressions, such as not working enough with the cats, drew punishment, and the Doctor's punishment could be brutal. For many years, she seemed to single out Pamela for the harshest treatment. Whenever Pamela made a mistake or failed to carry out some chore with the cats, she was forced to slap herself, sometimes for long periods of time, with other patients counting. This was, she admitted, toward the end, when the Doctor was losing it. But Pamela had been with the Doctor for so long that she couldn't see the absurdity of what she was being asked to do. She simply accepted it. In retrospect, she realized how crazy this behavior was, how cultlike the group had become, and how very much the Doctor resembled her long-ago governess.

  With so many cats, epidemics were inevitable, and often the Doctor would have twenty or thirty dead cats at once. At first she put the dead cats on the roof, where they mummified, but soon there were too many of them. Pamela and another patient began stuffing them in barrels filled with dirt, which they kept in the Doctor's basement. They would make periodic trips to New England to bury them.

  When Pamela moved to Queens, her own cat population quickly got out of hand. Her census shot up to two hundred cats. She received huge shipments of meat and hired people to mix the food. Keeping the place clean became impossible. Feces covered the floors, and the best she could do was pile it against the walls. Neighbors became suspicious because of the smell and the daily meat deliveries. The cost began to overwhelm her as well. She still had a good income, but all of it went to pay people to take care of the cats. After just a few years, she didn't have enough money to pay the mortgage or her taxes. She lost the house to foreclosure and had to move.

  She and the cats ended up in a house with another of the Doctor's patients, but the situation did not improve. Pamela, now in her mid-forties, spent most of her time caring for the Doctor's cats and could no longer work. Up at 3:00 A.M., she was at the Doctor's until nightfall, when she went home to care for her own cats.

  Looking back on it, Pamela saw that many of her cats were suffering. "I was careless with them. I did the same thing to the animals that my mother did with me," she said. She remembered one cat dying because she was just too tired from working all day at the Doctor's to give him his seizure medication. Finally, the neighbors sued, the health department came, and the ASPCA was called. Pamela panicked. She rented a large truck, loaded up as many of her brood as she could manage, and brought them to a shelter outside of town, hoping to get them all back after the raid. But the ASPCA raided the shelter as well and, according to Pamela, "slaughtered them all." Pamela returned to the shelter with a film crew to try to document what had happened. She found about forty of her cats still alive and "rescued" them once again. Pamela now had no money and no career. She and her cats moved in with yet another patient who had cats of her own. Money trouble plagued them both, and the two women fought. By Pamela's own account, after one fight she nearly killed her roommate, who kicked her out but kept the cats. "I didn't have any cats suddenly," she told me. "I was homeless, and in a way it was the most unbelievable liberation. I had nothing." For a time, she slept on the floor of a factory, let in each night by another friend who worked there.

  Despite her "liberation" from her own cats, and despite the upheaval in her life, Pamela's work at the Doctor's continued unabated. She worked from the early hours of the morning until late at night, but still the Doctor wanted more. Pamela slept only three hours each night and lost so much weight that she became little more than a skeleton. The Doctor stuck her with needles when she didn't hold the cats just right for their shots. Pamela toiled in slave-like conditions. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew this was wrong, but she felt powerless to end it, as if she were eight years old again and dealing with Mademoiselle. Finally, at the end of a long day, the Doctor sent her out on an errand. At fifty-two years old, dressed like a charwoman and smelling of cat urine, she started to run. She ran block after block through Manhattan until she felt that she was a safe distance away. She never saw the Doctor again.

  Rehabilitation

  Pamela set about the task of rehabilitating herself. She went on welfare and began collecting food stamps. At a homeless shelter, she learned upholstery, which led to several small jobs. Once she even got a small film contract. She realized that she had to stay away from animals simply to survive. To make sure she did, she issued what she said was a psychic message to all cats in need: "Cats, stay away from me. I can't help you anymore." And they stayed away, except for three cats in her apartment and one in her freezer, which she hadn't yet put to rest. Still, she remained true to her basic mission, "to rescue every cat that came my way," something she had done faithfully for twenty years. Luckily, either cats in need were now staying away or she failed to notice them.

  When I asked Pamela if she thought her capacity to care for animals was healthy or enjoyable, she said, "I don't know that it ever was ... I didn't let myself really enjoy it and feel them ever, until this last period now with these animals, and a little bit as I went along. But I've identified with them so much, and I could see my suffering in them, even though they weren't suffering."

  Based on the few studies on this topic and our interviews with several dozen animal hoarders, we surmise that people who hoard animals have several features in common. Most are female, well over forty years old, and single, widowed, or divorced. Cats and dogs are the most frequent animals hoarded, and the numbers vary widely but average around forty, with a few cases of well over one hundred. In about 80 percent of cases, dead, dying, or diseased animals can be found on the premises. Authorities identify between seven hundred and two thousand new cases of animal hoarding nationwide each year. Because only the most severe cases get reported, this is undoubtedly an underestimate.

  At the core of most animal hoarding cases is a special feeling for animals, a sense of connection that was hard for the people we interviewed to articulate. Pamela described it as "pure love," while others we interviewed described it as "beyond love" and uncomplicated by less worthy human emotions. Animals were seen as making few demands, while providing unconditional love and devotion. One of our interviewees even sheepish
ly admitted that she cared more for her dogs than she did for her husband or children. Another odd feature we observed was that the hoarders became more animal-like in their daily habits over time. Their homes were turned over to the animals, which seemed to have greater access and privileges than the people living there. Many said that they wanted their animals to be free and "natural," and so they had no rules for the animals' behavior. They were allowed to eat, sleep, and even relieve themselves wherever they wanted.

  Most animal hoarders experienced neglectful, abusive, and/or chaotic childhoods in which rules were absent or hopelessly inconsistent. Pamela grew up without any close connection to her parents and with an abusive caretaker. For her, animals were more reliable and affectionate companions than family members. The frequency with which we have seen this pattern and have heard animal hoarders say that they cared more about animals than about people has led us to think that animal hoarding may be a form of attachment disorder in which already frayed human bonds are easily broken and replaced by bonds with animals, which serve as surrogates for family. One animal hoarder we interviewed insisted that she wanted to find someone to love but hadn't been able to do so. Her cats, she said, "keep my love alive until I can find someone to love." She did not seem to realize that the condition of her home would dampen the enthusiasm of even the most ardent suitor.

  Many people we interviewed insisted that they had special abilities that allowed them to communicate with or understand animals more deeply than the rest of us. Several believed that they had psychic abilities that went beyond even their special connections to animals. Such beliefs left them convinced that they knew better than anyone else how animals feel, what they want, and how to care for them. These beliefs actually helped Pamela resolve her cat hoarding by giving her the sense that her "telepathic messages" to needy cats to stay away from her worked.

  But not everyone hoards animals for the same reasons, and assessing the motivation behind the behavior is essential to changing it. Based on the limited amount of research that's been done, animal hoarders seem to fall into one of three categories:

  • Overwhelmed caregivers own multiple pets and care for them well until they experience a significant change in their lives. With the death of a spouse, the loss of income, a sudden illness, or another major event, the demands of caring for a large number of animals become overwhelming. Often withdrawn and isolated by nature, overwhelmed caregivers don't know how to seek help. Once identified, this group often cooperates in resolving the problem more readily than other types of animal hoarders.

  • Mission-driven animal hoarders represent the bulk of animal hoarding cases. Rescuing animals from death or suffering drives these people to take in and keep too many animals. These rescue hoarders object to the use of euthanasia and often, as in Pamela's case, to neutering animals. Compared to overwhelmed caregivers, who acquire their animals passively, rescue hoarders actively seek out animals they believe to be at risk. The Doctor and her patients aggressively targeted any cat they encountered, even some already well cared for by other people. Like overwhelmed caregivers, rescue hoarders usually begin with adequate resources but are quickly swamped by caretaking tasks. Unlike overwhelmed caregivers, they actively avoid and resist intervention by authorities. They consider themselves to be the only ones who can provide adequate care for their animals, and like the Doctor and her patients, they sometimes have extensive networks of animal missionaries who enable their collecting. Ironically, when their animal counts overwhelm them, they end up causing the very kind of harm they seek to prevent.

  • Exploiters have little emotional connection to their animals. For them, animals are simply a means to an end. Sometimes that end is financial, and animals are used as props for generating money to run "rescue" operations. Sometimes the driving force is a more psychologically rooted need to control other living things, like the Doctor's need to exercise punitive control over her patients as well as her cats. Exploiters are the most difficult hoarding cases to manage. People in this category possess superficial charm and charisma but lack remorse or a social conscience. To other people, exploiters seem articulate and appealing, but in fact they are cunning manipulators, often conning money from others for their "rescue" efforts. Rejecting any kind of authority, they will go to great lengths to evade the law, including taking advantage of others if it suits their purpose. Luckily, these kinds of hoarders are rare.

  One of the most puzzling features of animal hoarding is the lack of recognition of a problem that is way out of control. Many animal hoarders can be standing amid their sick and dying animals, with feces covering the floors and walls, and still insist that nothing is wrong. This type of assertion, in the midst of clear evidence to the contrary, suggests a distorted belief system—a delusional disorder. Delusional disorders are usually highly specific and do not accompany distorted thinking in other areas of the person's life. Perhaps animal hoarding represents a delusional disorder with a special, almost magical connection with animals as the predominant theme.

  Interestingly, all of the former animal hoarders we have interviewed recognized how abnormal their beliefs were, but only well after they stopped hoarding. Circumstances at the time may have contributed to the apparent delusion. Since Pamela believed that she connected with cats as no one else could and that other people would castrate or euthanize them, she had no option but to keep going. Trapped by her own convictions, she may have changed the way she viewed the situation and convinced herself that things were not really as bad as they seemed. The strength of Pamela's belief was evident. Twenty years after she gave up hoarding, Pamela still saw her efforts in a positive light: "For twenty years, I was able to rescue any animal that came my way." To think otherwise would have meant that she had wasted those twenty years, an intolerable idea for most people.

  Most animal hoarding cases end up in court. Ironically, the charge is most often animal cruelty, the very thing many animal hoarders are desperate to prevent. Usually charges are dropped or reduced in exchange for their giving up custody of the animals. Often the court orders counseling, but seldom do these orders get followed.

  It is evident to us that animal hoarding is a particularly severe version of hoarding, complicated by even less insight and more difficult life circumstances than most object hoarding. We wonder how many animal hoarders also suffer from serious mental health problems, such as psychosis, bipolar disorder, or even PTSD. More research will help us better understand why these individuals allow animals to rule their lives to the obvious detriment of their own health and welfare, as well as that of their animals. The affection of animals can be a therapeutic tool for vulnerable people in the right circumstances. But it also appears to be a dangerous problem for those taken over by missionary zeal.

  Like the hoarding of objects, the hoarding of animals may reflect an intellect more expansive or tuned in to the features of the world than most. The people we interviewed displayed an unusual level of compassion and empathy, which would have been commendable if it had not been distorted by compulsion. But the attachment becomes rigid, unaltered by available resources or limitations—an attempt to love that winds up destroying its target. Whatever the causes, animal hoarding remains one of the least understood and most challenging of hoarding problems.

  7. A RIVER OF OPPORTUNITIES

  Life is a river of opportunities. If I don't grab everything interesting, I'll lose out. Things will pass me by. The stuff I have is like a river. It flows into my house, and I try to keep it from flowing out. I want to stop it long enough to take advantage of it.

  —Irene

  Betty liked Ralph right away. She met him when he approached the agency where she was a social worker, asking for help with his finances. At seventy-one, he was unable to manage his modest income from a trust set up by his parents. Collection agencies were hounding him, and he didn't know what to do. Along with handling his finances, Betty and other agency officials thought they should help him clear the debris from his yard and
do some home repairs. Ralph liked the agency staff and felt important when they paid attention to him. In fact, he liked most people, especially people who took an interest in him. He possessed a boyish charm that affected almost everyone willing to get beyond his speech difficulties. There was something appealing about his enthusiasm for everything and his earnestness. Above all things, he loved trains—toy trains, real trains, pictures of trains, and thinking about trains. He had made elaborate plans for constructing a Jurassic Park model train route in his house, and much of his collecting, especially of cardboard and Styrofoam, was driven by such plans.

  On her first visit to help clear his yard, Betty picked up a rusty bucket with a hole in it that she found sitting by the side of his house in a patch of weeds. She asked him about throwing it out. At first he didn't understand her. It seemed as though he couldn't quite comprehend that she would suggest such a thing. When he finally understood that she wanted him to discard it, he explained that the bucket was still quite useful. "But it has a hole in it. It won't hold water," said Betty. "There are other things it can hold," Ralph replied. "But you have other buckets, ones that will hold water and other things. You don't need this one," Betty argued. She continued patiently with the argument for nearly two hours. Finally, Ralph won; he kept the bucket. For her the bucket became a metaphor for Ralph's hoarding. Anything Ralph could imagine a use for had to be saved, no matter how unlikely that use might be.