The horrors of hoarding

In 2002, animal control officers in Liberty, Mo., went to a mobile home park on a report of animal hoarding.

They found 94 cats, four dogs, a rabbit and a ferret in a woman’s trailer. An officer, learning one of the dogs was diabetic, opened the refrigerator to check for insulin.

It was filled with dead cats, some in Tupperware containers.

The case is similar to one in Kansas City recently where officers carried more than 100 cats out of a woman’s house and found 50 or so dead and frozen in a deep freeze, tagged like hamburger.

Delores Metcalf, 56, seems to be a serial cat hoarder.

“She needed help back then, and she didn’t get it, and now she’s done it again,” a woman familiar with the Liberty, Mo., case said this week.

Perhaps that’s because animal hoarding has only recently been looked upon as a mental disorder. It is relatively new to psychological research, and experts struggle to nail it down.

Some researchers link hoarding to childhood trauma. Others say it’s an addiction, such as to drugs. Attachment disorder? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Safety and security issues? Loneliness?

“We’re trying to play catch-up,” said Ken Weiss, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The problem is that hoarders typically don’t seek treatment. They think nothing is wrong. The first contact with outsiders is usually with law enforcement.

“So the process has been a legal one, not one of mental health,” Weiss said.

But things are changing. It has to, because researchers now say 2 to 5 percent of the population exhibits some signs of hoarding one thing or another.

Gary Patronek of the Animal Rescue League of Boston said the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders is expected for the first time to include hoarding as a disorder.

Here are a few things researchers agree on so far:

• First signs of hoarding usually begin between ages 11 and 15.

• Women are more likely than men to animal hoard. They tend to go for cats; men hoard dogs.

• By no surprise, hoarders tend to live alone, but that appears to be a result of the hoarding, not a cause. Family members often pull away. Some have no telephone, and in some cases, no plumbing.

• Most don’t socialize with other people.

Hoarders often collect inanimate objects as well, making for cluttered homes that demand “goat paths” to get through rooms.

But a key trait for animal hoarders is the belief that they have a special ability to communicate and empathize with the creatures and that saving them was their life’s mission.

“Hoarders are usually oblivious to the well-being of the animals because it’s about them,” said Patronek, who has written extensively on the subject.

When their hoarding is discovered, they invariably say: “I love animals. I’m doing society a service.”

But what about cats in the freezer or Tupperware?

“Then they say that is an extension of their caring,” Weiss said.

Reality TV has cashed in on the issue with hoarding programs. “Confessions: Animal Hoarding,” which debuted last year on Animal Planet, shows people with large numbers of animals in their house living in filth and waste.

Cats and dogs are most commonly hoarded, but the show has featured rats, reptiles and even pot-bellied pigs.

A recent episode featured Tom, who has 29 snakes, 23 of them venomous, in his trailer home. For some reason he’s having a hard time finding a wife.

“If there’s a lady out there who likes snakes, it would be a match made in heaven,” Tom said.

A caller to the Kansas City Star this week, who identified herself as having knowledge of Metcalf’s family, said the woman had become isolated by her behavior. The caller added that Metcalf lived on disability benefits, which she usually spent on cat food.

Her house, which had no furniture, has been condemned by the city. She’d lived there two or three years, a neighbor said.

Lowell Gard, city prosecutor for Kansas City, didn’t know what would happen to Metcalf. She has been charged with having too many animals in her home and nuisance violations.

Intervention by mental health workers could be an option.

“She could take any of several paths,” Gard said Wednesday.

He’s seen hoarding cases before.

“Cats reproduce so quickly,” he said. One day, the owners “have 20, and then they have 60, and then they’re overwhelmed.”

And not know it.

An animal control official called Metcalf’s house “the worst case of cat hoarding” he’d ever seen.

As animal control officers worked at her house recently, Metcalf was told to stay in a lawn chair near the end of the driveway. She seemed generally oblivious as the sick, dying and frozen cats were taken from the house, until dusk fell and she was placed in a police vehicle.

But if she left, she asked, who would take care of her cats?