Clean Slate Photos and Video

A few people have asked for pictures of some of the animals I mentioned in an interview I did recently on NPR, about my time living at Clean Slate Animal Rescue, an animal rescue that I founded with a man who was later arrested for animal hoarding. The video clip I have included here is of the Kentucky elementary school where Dave and I set up Clean Slate after moving from Oregon. In this clip, my former partner's eighty-five year old father, Pop, is bringing in Annie the goat for milking. While I was there, we had fourteen goats - three of whom gave milk, which we used to supplement the cat and dog food. Pop was our resident milker, having grown up on a farm. The goats would volley for the best position to get in first, as it meant they would get the first shot at the grain they loved.


Here are a couple of photos, of happier times at the rescue.

This is Donna, a dog whose tragic death was the catalyst for my departure from Clean Slate. She was a funny, quirky little spitfire who was always giving the others hell when she didn't like what they were up to, but I love this photo that Dave took of her, because it captures her in one of those rare moments when she was completely relaxed.

The farm gang back in Oregon, in the fall of 2006. This was during our glory days - the house was orderly, the animals were well fed and in good condition, and Dave, Pop, and I were all in good cheer, working together to keep things running smoothly.


Me in one of the fenced areas out behind the school, with a few of the resident dogs. The area shown was one of three fenced runs outside, and was usually filled with goats and farm animals. When giving the grass a break from hungry mouths, we would release the farm animals in the front yard and let the dogs lounge in the back.

The Kentucky school where Dave and I lived, with Festus the Donkey out front.

Animal Hoarding: NPR Interview

On Monday, I drove to Portland to do an interview with Dick Gordon of NPR's The Story, relating my year and a half living in Oregon and Kentucky with anywhere from 75 to 110 animals with my former partner, who was later convicted of 295 counts of animal cruelty when 362 animals were found in the same Kentucky elementary school where we once ran Clean Slate Animal Rescue together.

To say the interview was difficult would be an understatement. To start with, I've been battling a wretched cold for a while now, which meant the hour and a half drive to P-Town was punctuated with bouts of coughing, random panic attacks and crying jags, and a lot of off-key singing along to the latest GLEE soundtrack. It wasn't pretty, in short. Still, I managed to get to the studio in one piece, and was met by a very nice studio tech whose name I have now completely forgotten (I was essentially focused on using as few 'ums' as possible, not choking to death on my own phlegm, and trying to keep from bursting into tears - still, I feel badly, because the tech was (a) pretty darn cute, and (b) a very nice guy).

We went into the studio, and started the interview a few minutes before eleven that morning. It was of course a remote interview - Dick Gordon wasn't there, and so I sat in the studio with headphones speaking into a gigantic puffy mic while the Cute Nameless Tech Man adjusted sound levels and smiled encouragingly. Over the course of the interview, I did have to stop a couple of times when I was completely overcome by coughing fits, but otherwise it went quite smoothly, I think. We basically ran through the entire year and a half, from my first date with Dave to our trek to California to buying the school in Kentucky, traveling cross-country, and then the decline of our relationship and my eventual departure. There were a couple of parts that were especially difficult - definitely talking about losing Benny and Donna to dog fights (the event that was the catalyst for my leaving) was very hard, but the other thing that was difficult was just trying to convey information about hoarding in general while still giving the story: I didn't want it to sound like I was preaching or some kind of expert, but definitely wanted to try and disseminate a little bit of factual information. I'm not sure whether I did that or not - honestly, the whole thing is kind of a blur.

My biggest concern at this point is just that I don't know how Dave will come out looking in all of this. It's never been my intent to make him look like a cruel man or even a crazy one... He loved the animals; that much was always clear. I wasn't a victim in any of this - it's not as though I was some wide-eyed twenty-year-old fresh off the farm, I'd been around the block a time or two. Had I known then what I know now about animal hoarding, I certainly would have handled things much differently. There are many things that I wish I had done differently, in terms of the medical care that the animals did (and did not) receive while I was there, and of course with respect to the unfathomable neglect they suffered after I left. Those are regrets I'll always carry with me, but the writing that I'm doing now, the interviews and the memoir and whatever else (if anything) comes of this, has nothing to do with any bitterness toward Dave. I haven't spoken with him since long before I read the news that he'd been arrested; I have no idea where he is now. I wish him luck. I hope that he's gotten the attention that he needs so that he might gain a little perspective and keep from repeating past patterns, but I don't know how realistic that hope is. I wish him the best.

ANYWAY... That's the stuff I didn't say in the interview, for what it's worth. As I said, I think that it went well. The episode is supposed to air on Tuesday, October 5th, so I'll be sure to post a link when it's available.

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.

Rescue Hoarding: A Personal Narrative

Since starting my website just over a year ago, I've gotten a few inquiries from people who are - or at least think they are - working for, or involved with, rescue hoarders. For those unfamiliar with the term, rescue hoarding is the term given to individuals who take on more animals than they can reasonably care for, under the guise of rescuing these animals from homelessness, abuse, or euthanasia. It is becoming increasingly common for such people to organize themselves as non-profits, actively taking donations in order to bring in even more animals, who will ultimately be neglected and in all likelihood will never, ever be adopted out.

For a year and a half, I lived with an individual who was ultimately convicted of animal hoarding. It's an odd thing to try to describe to outsiders what our lives were like, as it's generally agreed that one would have to be nuts to live under such conditions. In order to try and put some of my experiences in perspective, I've decided to begin posting the story as it began and ultimately unfolded. I have no idea if this will be helpful to others or not, but it is my hope that individuals who either see the potential to become hoarders themselves, or who are concerned they may be working with a hoarder, may find information and support through my story.

For the next few months, I will post periodically of my experiences with Clean Slate Animal Rescue, which I co-founded in the spring of 2006. The experiences I had in the year and a half subsequent to founding the rescue are difficult to describe: my partner and I saved lives, worked constantly, traveled many miles. I learned more in that eighteen months than in my entire life prior to that time. During the final months that I spent with the rescue, I watched our hard work unravel as my partner continued to take in animals that I knew we could not care for and would never place. We lived in isolation; the health of the animals began to decline; no money was coming in, while plenty of it was going out. I began plotting my escape in the spring of 2007, whispering my plans to my family during late-night phone calls when I could get time away from my partner. In November of 2007, I left Kentucky with my two dogs and what few belongings I could bring along without arousing suspicion, telling my partner that I would be gone for two weeks. I had an apartment and a new job waiting for me in Maine.

Leaving behind the animals I'd come to love was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I wish there had been another way for me to help them; I think, often, of the ways I could have handled things differently, ways I could have been more proactive about assisting with adoptions or insisting we take no more animals in. I regret, everyday, the cowardice of my leaving, and wish I had understood my partner's mental condition better, so that I might have alleviated some of the suffering that ultimately took place in that building. In February of 2009, I learned that my former partner had been charged with animal hoarding; 362 animals were found inside the school, the living kept in rooms with the dead. I read reports online, scanning the photos for pictures of the dogs I had helped to rescue. The faces I had known were now scarred and battleworn, their fur patchy with mange, their ribs showing as a result of malnutrition and neglect.

A story like this doesn't happen overnight. In the coming months, I'll do what I can to tell things from the beginning - those first tentative meetings in Oregon, the gradual escalation, the trek cross-country, the final unraveling. There are no monsters in this story, there is no clear bad guy. Animal rescue is a complicated world, and hoarding is an illness that the mental health community is still struggling to understand. If my story can help the animals or the individuals impacted by the phenomenon of rescue hoarding, then I believe it is worth the telling.