The first week on my own on an Oregon farm in the summer of 2006, I was caring for a batch of kittens my partner had "rescued" from a high-kill shelter in northern California. My partner, Dave, had gone back to California - I was alone with twenty dogs and about twenty cats, along with cows, llamas, chickens, a goat named Seymour and a sheep named Cornelius. My days were filled with chores - laundry, feedings, letting the dogs out, getting the dogs in. And nursing the kittens, all of whom had upper respiratory infections.
URI is a common ailment among cats in shelters. An airborne illness, it circulates and recirculates without proper care and containment, and is often fatal to kittens, senior cats, and any felines with compromised immune systems. In shelters, those afflicted are typically treated with antibiotics and quarantined until they are better, if the shelter has the space, money, and manpower to invest in the cats' recuperation. If they do not, the cats are frequently euthanized.
On the farm, we had a large, closed garage with no circulation, no heat during the winter and no air conditioning in the summer. A huge fan was set up on one end of the building to circulate the stale air within. The ill kittens were kept in a giant, metal mastiff crate big enough for me to climb into. I did this three times a day, sitting against the metal bars while kittens climbed over me or slept fitfully in my lap. They were very sick - their noses and eyes gummy with mucous, their breathing labored. I fed them baby food that they would suck from the tip of my finger. When the first one - a little tabby kitten I named Stevie - died, I was with him. I listened to him wheeze his final breath, told him it was okay to let go.
It was not a good death. I lost five more kittens that week; none of the deaths were 'good' deaths. Perhaps there is no good death for one so young, but I believe what they suffered in their final hours was among the worst ways any animal could leave this world. Holding their tiny bodies, I can remember sitting in that cage longing for a needle, for the strength to end their suffering myself, for anything to end what they were going through. What is the best way to kill a kitten?
In the year and a half that I was with Dave, I sat through many such deaths. Dave assured me that this was the part of animal rescue people didn't talk about - this was what it was like on the front lines. Animals died because people abandoned them, bred them carelessly, or returned them when they became inconvenient. We were the good guys.
Dave did not sit through the deaths. "You can't do this to yourself," he told me once, when I insisted on holding a goat as it passed from this world, wracked with convulsions. "You'll burn out if you keep doing this."
I disagreed. I had no money to get medical care for them myself, and my insistence that we take in no more until we could care for those we had, consistently fell on deaf ears. The least I could do, it seemed to me, for these animals who were pulled from shelters and never given the chance for a good life or a good death, was to sit with them in those final moments. To mark their passing, hold them, acknowledge that they had touched someone in this world.
I became the death keeper.
In a recent interview with Dick Gordon on NPR's The Story, Dick asked me in bewilderment that bordered on anger, how animal hoarders could purport to love the animals who were living in filth and neglect around them, often dying hideous deaths alone.
I don't have a definitive answer, but I watched Dave through that year and a half. He loved the animals, without question. He doted on them, agonized over what the best decision was for their well-being, and wept for them when they passed. As the months progressed and it became clear that the dream I thought we were working toward for a clean, well-run, organized facility was not a vision we shared, I saw a glimmer of something else begin to surface in Dave. He was haunted by those we couldn't save, tormented by the thought of overflowing shelters and furious with anyone who disagreed with his perspective.
His zeal became madness, difficult to argue with and impossible to understand.
Dave was terrified of death. He believed that he could tell when animals - and people - were about to die. On more than one occasion, he told me that he couldn't bear to look his aging father in the eye, because he believed he would be able to "see death," as he called it. He said the same about me at times, and spoke of it often with the animals.
"I saw it," he told me of one of the cats, Flat Tail, who died shortly after we arrived in Kentucky. "I knew he didn't have long. I don't even want to look at these guys anymore."
When death is that terrifying and that unstoppable, perhaps for him it became a manner of self-defense to stop looking the animals in the eye as the situation deteriorated, after I was gone. To forge ahead with maniacal zeal, unable to admit that the blood, sweat, and tears shed for these animals he had purported to love above all else, actually paved the way for unimaginable suffering at his hands.
I often wonder what happened in the year after I left Dave and the school, that led him to 360 animals - some living, some dead, - living as a recluse with his father, feared by many in the community, pitied by others. He was viewed as a martyr for the cause by many, even after his arrest. Letters to the editor spoke of a man who had put the animals first and done something about the hideous state of animal welfare in the south, when no one else would.
The truth may never be completely known or understood, but that disconnect between how an animal hoarder sees his situation versus the reality of his surroundings is ultimately what leads to the suffering, neglect, and eventual death of the animals in his care. It is that disconnect that must be addressed, if we are ever to understand the way a hoarder sees the world, and put an end to the chaos and suffering they create.
