Stuff (17 page)

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 Often withdrawn and isolated by nature, overwhelmed caregivers don't know how to seek help.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.

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.

I found out about Ralph through Betty. He was delighted to learn that someone was interested in his habit of collecting free and inexpensive things, and he agreed to be interviewed. When I first met Ralph, he was standing on his front porch rummaging through a pile of worn and broken shovels, garden carts, and lawn mower parts. His long gray hair stuck out from beneath a hat pulled tightly over his head. His shoulders hunched forward a bit as he stood. Ralph was a well-known fixture in his Boston suburb, frequently spotted pedaling his bicycle, pulling a cart filled with newfound treasures. He grinned broadly when he saw me and eagerly shook my hand. "Doctor, Doctor," he said, "thank you for coming."

Like the homes on the hoarding tour of Berkeley, California (see chapter 4), Ralph's house was nearly hidden by overgrown trees and shrubs, although they were not enough to conceal the cardboard-covered windows, peeling paint, and piles of scrap lumber and metal in the yard. The house stood in stark contrast to the well-kept and expensive homes in the neighborhood. Ralph had lived there for more than fifty years. For the past twenty, since his parents' deaths, the house had received very little attention or repair.

A speech impediment compromised Ralph's ability to communicate. To compensate, he used dramatic facial expressions and gestures to convey meaning. He also augmented his speech by communicating through metaphor, frequently using props such as newspaper articles or pictures from magazines to express his point of view. Sometimes this backfired, such as the time shortly after the September 11 attacks when he cut out a picture of a captured terrorist to use in conversations about terrorism. His intent was to communicate his fear of people like this man, but the effect was to frighten those he wanted to talk to. Even worse was the time he cut out a sexually suggestive picture to communicate that he didn't like such portrayals in the media. The picture, together with his hard-to-understand speech and odd appearance, led to several unpleasant encounters.

Ralph used certain words as metaphors for larger, harder-to-explain concepts. One such word was "privacy." He repeated that he needed privacy whenever he thought someone was trying to force him to do something, especially when it related to his house or possessions.

Ralph's father had been an engineer and a corporal in the army, and the family had moved a lot when Ralph was young. After finishing high school, Ralph lived on his own for a few years, but apart from a long backpacking trip through Europe in his late thirties, he lived at home with his parents for most of his life. He was a devoted son whose life centered on his parents and a very small group of friends. Both of his parents collected things, but neither had a problem with clutter. His father collected cameras, his mother dolls and embroidery. She kept the house well organized and tidy. During my visits to his home, when Ralph found something that had belonged to one of his parents amid his stuff, he made stabbing motions to his chest to demonstrate how brokenhearted he was about their passing. When they died, his life turned solitary, and for many years no one visited his home.

Ralph inherited his father's interest in how things work and how broken things can be fixed. He did not inherit his mother's knack for organizing. She frequently scolded him for not keeping his room neat. Yet as long as she was alive, he had few problems with clutter. Just how long it took Ralph's home to fill up after his parents died wasn't clear, but he first came to the attention of the Council on Aging about fifteen years after his mother's death.

Ralph was devoted to finding an object's usefulness. Once when I visited, he showed me a piece of an old Venetian blind, vintage 1950. The rest of the blind had been discarded, though not by Ralph. "Most people would throw this out," he proudly told me. "Not me." He described how it connected to the rest of the blind and how it could be repaired. He insisted that somewhere there was someone who needed just such a piece. For most of us, this would not be a sufficient reason for keeping it. For Ralph and many other people with hoarding problems, it is more than sufficient. Ralph saw it as a challenge to find a use for such a thing. In deciding to save this piece, however, he, like most people who hoard, failed to consider the cost of keeping it.

Apart from fixing things, Ralph loved newspapers, especially those with articles containing information he found useful. And for Ralph, most newspapers contained something useful. He recalled a newspaper article about a flood that sent six inches of water coursing down a street. The water was powerful enough to wash away a car. "I didn't realize it could be so powerful. I want to be aware of things like that. I want to know everything," he told me. His home contained thousands of newspapers stacked neatly in piles, some as tall as he was and threatening to collapse as he added to them. To clear space, he moved some to his garage, where they grew wet and moldy. Still he couldn't part with them. He told me once that he felt as if he would drown if he didn't get a chance to read these newspapers. This addiction to information was strikingly similar to other cases we had seen. Irene, for example, described herself as an "information junkie," unable to let go of anything containing a useful tidbit. Ralph knew there was a wealth of knowledge contained in those newspapers. Saving them allowed him to believe that he still had access to all that information. Most of us would make the decision to give up such access in order to maintain a comfortable environment, but not Ralph. Old, yellowing newspapers represented opportunities he couldn't bear to pass up.

Despite the arguments about the stuff in his yard, Ralph grew quite attached to Betty and she to him. Even so, she worked with Ralph for four years before he allowed her inside his house. When she finally saw it, she was both appalled and frightened. The house was so full and so dangerous, she feared for his life. "Every room," she told me, "was packed full, nearly to the ceiling." The piles of newspapers could easily tip over and crush him. Most of the doors were packed shut. The front door opened only partway, requiring her to turn sideways to enter. She could barely navigate the narrow pathways. He would never get out alive if his house caught on fire.