“Hoarders no help for rescued pets - Columbus Dispatch” |
| Hoarders no help for rescued pets - Columbus Dispatch Posted: 03 Sep 2010 03:15 AM PDT LOS ANGELES - Linda Bruno called her Pennsylvania cat rescue the land of milk and tuna. It thrived for years as people sent pets they couldn't care for from hundreds of miles away - unaware it was a death camp for cats. Investigators who raided the place two years ago found killing rooms, mass graves so thick they couldn't take a step without walking on cat bones and a stunning statistic: Bruno had taken in more than 7,000 cats in the previous 14 months, but only found homes for 23. In doing so, she had become a statistic herself, one of an increasing number of self-proclaimed rescuers who have become animal hoarders running legal and often nonprofit charities. Rescues and shelters now make up a quarter of the estimated 6,000 new hoarding cases reported in the U.S. each year, said Dr. Randall Lockwood, ASPCA's senior vice president of forensic sciences and anticruelty projects. "When I first started looking into this 20 years ago, fewer than 5 percent would have fit that description," Lockwood said. Hoarding itself is not a crime in most states, but cruelty is, and both can start around the same time - when one more animal becomes one too many. Rescuers take in rejected, abandoned, abused or stray pets. Some of the animals come from shelters as they are about to be euthanized. It remains a mystery how someone goes from trying to rescue animals to stockpiling them in inhumane conditions without food, water or basic care. No single trigger has been found, but dementia, addiction, attachment disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other psychological problems are often blamed. "The root of it is really nothing to do with animals. It's to do with people's heads and how they work," said Gregory Castle, co-founder and chief executive officer of Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah. The focus on hoarding of all kinds has intensified in recent years because of widely publicized cases and television shows about it. The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium at Tufts University is urging the American Psychiatric Association to include animal hoarding in its next update to its diagnostic bible. Some hoarders develop a "messiah complex," seeing themselves as saviors even as animals die. One hoarder told Lockwood: "I wouldn't give one of my dogs to Jesus Christ if he came in the door." Bruno was seen as a cat saint of sorts. She surrounded herself with volunteers who enabled her and rallied around her when the 29-acre Tiger Ranch Cat Sanctuary in Tarentum, Pa., was shut down. Some 700 people signed a petition seeking dismissal of the case. Cats were found in nearly every filthy, stinky building on the 29-acre property. Many were too sick, starved or weak to get to the little food or water available. The Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals recovered 391 live cats and 106 dead ones. Thousands were believed to be dead and buried. Bruno, 47, was sentenced to two years of house arrest and 27 years' probation. She was ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution and $21 a day for electronic monitoring. Several agencies received reports of hoarding at Bruno's ranch, but it took months to document. Typically, the accused offer myriad excuses. It's hard to believe the excuses after seeing inches-thick feces, urine-stained walls, cages stacked high with starving animals, rotting carcasses, trash, fleas, maggots and diseases, said John Welsh, spokesman for the Riverside (Calif.) Department of Animal Services. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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