Rescue Hoarding: Inured to Chaos

This post is the second in my Rescue Hoarding series, the first of which can be found here.

"How does anyone live that way?" I asked my former partner once, when we were just starting out together.

He looked around thoughtfully. We were at Alice's - a woman who fostered for an established non-profit in Portland, Oregon. Alice lived in a modular home with an indeterminate number of dogs - so many, in fact, that the house seemed to literally be bursting its seams. They tunneled under floorboards, had broken windows and busted through doors. On one side of the house, two mutts were trying to scrabble past a window boarded with cardboard and duct tape. It was almost impossible to hear over the barking. Off to the side of the muddy yard, there was a pile of half-empty, moldy dog food bags. I stepped over a dead rat the size of a small dog.

"You get inured," he said after a while. "It doesn't happen all at once. Gradually, things that seemed unacceptable before just become another part of your day."

I looked at him, and realized he was speaking from experience. I'd seen the way Dave lived before I moved in with him: filthy carpets, a yard overflowing with soiled dog blankets, animals kept in dirty crates with no opportunity to exercise or be outside. That, he assured me, was not his fault - his last rescue partner had "bailed out," he told me. She'd lock herself in her room and refuse to come out, throw fits if he asked her to help him with the animals, hurl things at him if he didn't make her meals or do her laundry. Dave was the victim; I was fixing things.

I moved in and cleaned the carpets. Washed the mountain of dirty clothes in the laundry room, and then began tackling the soiled blankets in the yard. Dogs that hadn't been exercised for a month or more slowly began being integrated into play groups. One dog, a pit bull named Cara, had been locked in a back bedroom alone for a month. She had sores all over her skin and would spring like a Jack-in-the-box, straight into the air, the moment anyone paid any attention to her. The room smelled of urine and feces, and there were maggots in the dog crate where she slept at night.

"I don't want to live that way," I told Dave. "I never want my life to get like that." When I moved in, Dave didn't have a bed. The first night that I spent in the house with him, we'd slept on a rug that smelled of urine, with dogs on all sides.

"I never want to get that way again," he agreed. "That's not what I want - I want us to travel. See the country, see the world. There's more to life than this."

It turns out that not everyone gets "inured" the way that someone like Dave, a diagnosed animal hoarder, does. I certainly felt that line in the sand slipping for me over the year and a half that Dave and I were together, but it never reached a point where I was unaware of the squalor around me. In Kentucky, flies covered every square inch of our 750-square foot commercial kitchen; we'd spray the place down with Raid every evening, and then I'd dutifully wash the surfaces and sweep up insect carcasses afterward. Mice skittered across my feet while I was cooking. Every night, I washed the floor with bleach, watching maggot bodies curl in on themselves behind the garbage can, where they gathered regardless of how frequently I cleaned.

The difference between Dave and I, it seemed, was that he simply didn't mind the mess. Sometimes, he didn't even seem to see the mess.

"Just leave the dishes," he'd tell me at the end of a long night.

"If I leave the dishes, we'll have more flies in the morning. And more mice." We had no hot water in the kitchen. I boiled water on the stove we'd hauled all the way from the farm in Oregon, then dumped it into the huge, stainless steel double sinks.

"Suit yourself," he'd say. "I'm gonna go switch out the dogs."

We'd turned the gymnasium into a doggie-play-world, and the stage into our living room. Dave had a 62-inch TV that had made the move first from California to Oregon, then Oregon to Kentucky. We bought an outdoor swinging chair at Walmart because Dave said the rocking soothed him; sitting still made him nervous. We put a piece of wire fencing across the front of the stage, so the dogs couldn't get up there unless we invited them. We'd sit and watch movies while the dogs played in the gym.

In June of 2007, I went back to Maine for two weeks. When I returned, there were dirty dishes piled high, and two dead mice floating in the cold, greasy sink water. The maggots had multiplied, no longer isolated to the corner behind the garbage can. They squirmed rice-white bodies along the stainless steel countertops, in behind the food containers. Two months earlier, we'd lost two of the long-time rescue dogs to dog fights among the ranks, and one of the dogs we'd rescued locally was in isolation with a confirmed case of Parvo.

"This isn't working for me anymore," I told Dave in mid-July. I was wracked with guilt; most of my two weeks in Maine had been spent in tears, trying to imagine how I could turn my back on Dave and the animals. "Maybe if we just admitted the relationship isn't working... It's not that I want to leave," I continued. We were cleaning the classroom that had been converted into a sick room for Dobby, our Parvo patient. I was lying: I did want to leave. I wanted desperately to leave. But there was no way I could say that. "But if we stop pretending the romantic stuff is working, and just treat this like a business partnership..."

We hadn't had sex in over a year. Our conversations were limited to animal feeding, medication, rescue. Since moving to Kentucky in March, we had been sleeping on a foam pad in the former school library with at least ten dogs. I had ringworm, and over the past year had suffered through two bouts of cat scratch fever and had been at the center of a dog attack that left me with scars on my ankles, wrists, and elbows. Dave didn't say anything during my much-rehearsed speech. Dobby was romping at our feet - he was a big-eared, long-legged hound mix who, miraculously, survived Parvo and his month-long incarceration unscathed. Finally, Dave put the mop away and looked at me.

"I guess I'll have to think about that," he said. His eyes were cold, hard. I hated that look - Dave was a master of the scornful glare, a look that conveyed with a skill far beyond mere words that he was superior, the only one with an ounce of compassion. I was greedy and selfish for wanting to devote myself to anything beyond saving the animals who shared our home.

He left the room.

I realized then that I would never be inured to this. I would never be able to live in filth, to allow the animals to go without the socialization or care they required, regardless of what the ultimate goal might be. Dave didn't speak to me for the rest of the day, something I'd gotten used to over our time together. When I'd confronted him about our issues another time two months earlier, it had been a full seventy-two hours before he deigned to speak with me again. As with the other times, I broke first. That evening, I went to him and burst into tears.

"We don't have to figure this out right now," he told me. He gave me a hug, wiped my eyes. I nodded.

That night, I began plotting my escape.