Animal Hoarding: Death and the Animal Hoarder

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.

Animal Hoarding and the Adoption Question

Over the weekend, a friend e-mailed me this link posted by Kimi Peck, who has been under investigation numerous times for animal hoarding in southern California. Her questionable activities have been documented on a couple of different sites, most notably the website Save the Chihuahuas. Though the content of Ms. Peck's letter in general is a little, shall we say off-center, it was one comment in particular that caught my attention:

"One of Tufts University definitions of a hoarder
A hoarder doesn't adopt out animals. No one can take care of the animals better than they can."

I was actually unable to find anything on the Tufts website stating explicitly that animal hoarders do not adopt animals out, though the ASPCA does stipulate that with so-called rescue hoarders, "Little effort is made to adopt animals out."

This, to me, is a very important point in the debate over whether or not someone is actually an animal rescuer or an animal hoarder. In this post, I talk about Alice (not her real name), a woman living with over fifty dogs and a multitude of cats and farm animals at her small home in Oregon. Alice was the go-to foster home for an organized, 501(c)3 animal rescue, which meant that many of her dogs were adopted out regularly. However, the fact that they were adopted out had little to do with Alice's efforts; Alice focused primarily on getting more dogs. On more than one occasion, I can remember her contacting Dave and I upon receiving the latest PTS (Put-to-Sleep) list from the California shelter we worked with regularly.

"We want all of them," she would tell us. "We could get homes for every one of them - we don't want a single one of them put down."

Naturally, the rescue coordinator at the Merced County shelter was thrilled to hear this. And it was true that the animal rescue itself had a good adoption record; it was also true that there were a surprising number of dogs at Alice's house that, she assured us, could never be adopted out. There was a compulsive Lab who would fetch from one end of the property to the other for as long as someone would throw for him; there was a mysterious Doberman living inside who had attacked Alice and the other dogs on numerous occasions for taking up space on the bed; there were Pugs with asthma and mutts with allergies. None of these dogs, we were assured, would ever find someone to care for them the way Alice did.

My own experiences with Dave were not dissimilar. Before I came onboard, his rescue partner was an extremely motivated rescuer who was adept at making connections and getting animals adopted out. She was active online, quick to post photos and descriptions, and was a general whiz at the virtual side of animal rescue. Dave did the home visits and got more animals. Lots and lots more animals. The animals' care while at the farm was negligible, something Dave justified because "it's just a quick fix - they come in, they go out. It's better than being dead."

Since that particular rationale never really did much for me, I informed Dave when I came on board that I wanted to be more hands-on than his previous partner: I didn't want to be on the computer all the time. He could handle the networking and adoptions. I did the cleaning, enrolled with Animal Behavior College and started reading up on training, administered medication, developed nutrition plans for some of our more immuno-compromised charges. Our adoption rates were abysmal, though Dave assured me that this was just because we were in transition. We were taking a break; rehabilitating the animals we had. In the meantime, we did a couple of transports and thus could increase the numbers of animals we said we had successfully placed by simply driving them from one rescue to the other, with minimal interaction in between.

I am not an expert on animal hoarding, but in my experience, this is what I have found with the rescue hoarder:

(1) Their successfully placed animals (Kimi Peck claims she has adopted out more than 5000 Chihuahuas in her rescue career) are significantly inflated and corresponding records to back up such claims notably absent;

(2) If adoption rates are high, it is because someone else within the organization is driving those adoptions; were that individual to leave, placement rates would likely plummet;

(3) These placement rates often take into account things with which the actual individual had little involvement: adoption drives by other members of the organization; transporting animals for other rescues; and, in Kimi Peck's case, animals that were actually seized by the authorities and forcibly placed in the hands of other animal rescues;

(4) There are an infinite number of excuses as to why an animal may not be adoptable, and therefore must be added to the roster of permanent charges. Dave had five dogs that he called his own, however we had about a dozen others that were deemed unadoptable, and no efforts were ever made to adopt out the cats, though he would think nothing of bringing in another dozen at a time to live out their lives at the rescue. This may have been admirable had we not constantly been struggling with flea infestations, upper respiratory epidemics, and a complete lack of socialization opportunities.

So, there you have it... The rescue hoarder does adopt out animals, however - in the words of Gia Logan, who runs animalhoardinginfo.blogspot.com, "Hoarders do adopt out, but it may be one every couple of months. (Legitimate) rescuers work at adopting out, every weekend, showing their animals, etc... Even in the book on Barbara Erickson (Inside Animal Hoarding, by Celeste Killeen) she adopted out... But they collect more than they adopt. A (legitimate) rescue keeps the numbers manageable, their animals healthy."

Rescue Hoarding: Excerpt from Memoir, Cats in the Cradle and Bullies in the Belfry

The following is an excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, Cats in the Cradle and Bullies in the Belfry, detailing the year-and-a-half that I spent with a man later convicted of animal hoarding, when he was found with 362 animals - some alive, some dead - in an elementary school he purchased in Kentucky when we were still together. It is my hope that by telling some of these stories, other individuals who find themselves involved with hoarders will be able to recognize the signs, overcome the guilt and conflicted emotions inevitable in such a situation, and rise to help the animals locked in such tragic circumstances.

Three weeks after our first meeting through an online dating service in Portland, Oregon, Dave asked if I would like to go with him to California, where he was readying his house for sale. My family was horrified. My Portland friends were likewise appalled. I knew very little about him – the things I did know were certainly enough to give one pause. I’d never seen his place in Oregon, never met any of his friends. I knew that he ran an animal rescue from his home, but had only seen photos from his website. We'd been on dates, talked on the phone, exchanged e-mails... After a lengthy internal debate and an even lengthier external one with all those warning me that I would likely be killed and dumped in a ditch somewhere, I made my decision:

I’d moved to Oregon for new experiences. To be brave, step outside the narrow boundaries I’d set for myself over the years.

I would go to California.

We were to leave on the first of June, 2006 – a Thursday. That afternoon passed with no word from Dave. The evening, likewise, passed. That night, Dave finally called.

“Boarding fell through for the dogs, so we might have to take a couple of them with us.” He sounded tired. My reservations began to fade; I imagined the two of us in his mysterious Marin home with a couple of homeless pooches lying contentedly at our feet.

“That’s all right,” I quickly reassured him. “Take your time getting everything ready, and try to get some sleep tonight. We’ll leave tomorrow. And it’ll be fun to have some dogs around – don’t worry about it.”

The next day came and went. In our next phone conversation, two dogs had magically turned into ten. My reservations returned. Friday night at eleven o’clock, Dave called to say that we would definitely be leaving on Saturday afternoon. Our ten dogs might be as many as thirteen, but certainly no more than twenty.

I went to my cozy little kitchen and began preparing thermoses of calming tea, in anticipation of a long weekend of panic attacks and general insanity.

Saturday night at nine o’clock, Dave pulled up in front of my apartment building in upper Northwest Portland, in his green Dodge van. The Rose Festival had just begun: pretty girls in pretty dresses and trendy boys with hipster hats walked hand-in-hand on the sidewalk. It was a warm evening, the air scented with the blooms of spring: Roses and lilacs, a residual trace of cigar smoke from my upstairs neighbor.

Those scents vanished as soon as I opened the door to Dave’s van, replaced with the overpowering scent of wet dog, a vague undercurrent of eau de livestock to add punch. I handed Dave my backpack, clutched my thermos of calming tea a little bit tighter, and climbed in.

Barks and whines began in earnest the moment I closed the door. A particularly shrill yelp came from a crate closest to my seat – I tried to peer inside, but could see nothing but a pair of shining eyes in the dim light of the van.

“That’s Puppy,” Dave explained. “He doesn’t like crates.”

I hesitated. “Can I let him out?”

Dave glanced at me. Half the neighborhood was blocked off for the Rose Festival; he was having a hard time navigating the myriad of one-way streets to get us back on the highway.

“Once he gets in your lap, he’s never getting out – he’s a big baby.”

That didn’t sound like a bad thing. In my experience, puppies trump calming tea every time when coping with anxiety. I opened the crate, and a wriggling black and tan pup with big ears came leaping out. I scooped up the sleek little man and cuddled him on my lap. Moments later, his nose resting on my arm, the little dog was asleep.

We arrived at Dave’s home, a ranch-style house in the much-sought-after county of Marin, at 10 a.m. the following morning. I’d gotten no more than an hour of sleep during the drive, while Dave hadn’t slept at all – insisting that it was better for the dogs if we drove straight through. Though clearly exhausted, he shrugged off my suggestion of a nap with an eyebrow tipped north and the clear implication that I must be mad.

“Now? But we just got here.”

A nap was out of the question anyway, as we had eleven dogs who’d been stuck in crates for more than twelve hours. Working in tandem, we managed to get all of the dogs out for a quick bathroom break, with Dave providing color commentary and one-sentence bios on each of the residents.

“That’s Stache – hold onto him, we’ll never catch him if he gets away. And keep him away from the other crates, he’ll fence fight with anyone he sees.” This was delivered with a nod toward the charge I held on a short lead: A beautiful, dark grey guy with the softest coat I’d ever touched, and a curly tail. “He’s from Taiwan, so he’s a little shy.”

Dave quickly pulled out Stache’s crate, cleaned it in the driveway, and carried it inside. The front yard was overgrown, and the inside of his home equally neglected. A drum set, guitars, and amps that I later learned belonged to Dave’s stepdaughter, were set up in the otherwise-empty living room. Paint was peeling, and there were stains on the walls and holes in the flooring. An open case of laminated flooring had spilled in the entryway, covered in dust and dirt.

Stache went back into his crate, and was relegated to a room in the back of the house where Dave’s old office had been. A desk and piles of computer equipment remained, along with posters and flyers of political causes I’d never heard of. I tried to imagine this place as a home – the house where he’d been married, raised two kids, run a successful business for nearly twenty years. He told me that when his ex-wife had lived there, the place had been filled with antique furniture, immaculate and tastefully decorated.

Looking around, I couldn’t even imagine it.

As Dave and I cleaned crates and tried to organize the dogs to maximize safety and harmony, stories began to emerge.

Underdog, a lab mix rescued from the put-to-sleep list at a county shelter in California, was thin to the point of breaking, his stomach bloated like the malnourished children in UNICEF ads. “He looks a hell of a lot better than he did, though,” Dave assured me. I wasn’t sure how that could possibly be true. His backside was nearly bald from a case of demodectic mange, and his spinal column stood out starkly against his frail frame. Undie didn’t seem to be lacking in energy or enthusiasm, however; we released him in Dave’s fenced backyard with three similarly-sized dogs – Puppy, Toast, and Emily – and all four pups were quickly oblivious to our presence.

Next came Heffalump. She sat whining piteously in her crate, her wide cattle dog face nevertheless grinning at our approach.

“Watch her,” Dave warned me. “She can be a grumpus bear sometimes.” I raised my eyebrows at his words, but said nothing. In time, I would become well-acquainted with the term – it was something I was accused of myself on many occasions, when the days grew long and tempers proportionately shorter.

Heff came out of her crate like a barrel-chested bullet. Once I had her in hand, I realized that she was missing a hind leg. Despite this, she managed to propel herself with startling speed; I clung to the end of the leash, amazed at how one hind leg could support such a dense little body.

Those were the “easy” dogs. Dave handled the rest while I looked on, watching curiously as he interacted with a class of dog I’d had little experience with: the bullies.

There was Piglet, a scrawny little black pit bull/lab mix who, Dave said, had been chained to a barrel for the first three years of her life. She was finally rescued by the famed Best Friends; from there, she and two of her fellow so-called “pocket pits” were transported to Dave’s place. The others found homes without a problem, but Piglet – with her hyena-like bark, aggression toward all things smaller than she, and lack of socialization with humans – had proven to be a much more difficult placement.

There was Cookie, a beautiful brindle pit mix who loved everyone – dogs, people, the world at large. She had come from another county shelter in California. She came out of her crate and nearly knocked me to the floor; I felt the power in her shoulder muscles, saw the definition in her hind legs, and melted at the wide bully grin I’d soon come to know so well. Cookie quickly abandoned me in favor of Dave, leaping ecstatically in the air with a high-pitched squeal and then barking frantically when we returned her to her crate after her all-too-brief walk.

Next came Jellybean.

“She’s the one you told me about, right?” I looked on curiously, from a distance. Jellybean was black and white, and – though not emaciated like Underdog – was clearly underweight. She panted heavily in her crate, her eyes following our every move.

“Yeah – Jelly here’s been having some trouble lately.”

Dave was master of the understatement. Jellybean had been involved in two serious fights with the other dogs back in Oregon, and had attacked one of the llamas on the farm – clamping on so tightly that Dave said he hadn’t been sure he’d be able to get her off.

With the sound of growls, barks, and whines as background music, we made sure everyone was secure before releasing Jellybean in yet another empty back room. Her tail whipped back and forth at sight of Dave, but she remained aloof when I approached. With time and space, she soon came around. She sniffed me cautiously and nuzzled my hand. Within a few minutes, we were fast friends.

And then there was Cara. Cara was a 60-pound pit bull mix with a skin condition so severe she’d lost most of her hair. Her skin beneath was pink and raw, her ribs showing starkly beneath. She was isolated from the others for fighting issues. She looked at me through her crate door with oversized amber eyes and a wide bully grin.

Dave was quick to explain away the dogs’ conditions: He and his foster partner had taken on cases nobody else would take. They’d come to him this way. Everything would have been fine, the dogs would have been healthy and happy, if his partner hadn’t bailed on him. It was better than being dead, wasn’t it?

I wasn’t so sure.

My final introduction was to Donna – the dog who would change everything for me, from start to bloody finish.

Dave carried her crate inside without taking its resident for a walk, explaining as he went.

“She’ll have to be isolated for now – she’s a fear biter. If she gets out, we’ll never catch her.”

She was another street mutt from Taiwan, completely unsocialized and terrified of humans. We took her to a room with a sliding glass door at the far side of the house, looking out over the little courtyard out back. The room was piled high with boxes, newspapers scattered in every direction. Dave opened the crate and I peered inside.

Crouched against the back wall, a little blonde dog with long hair and a pointed, elfin nose stared at me. Though she had been with Dave for nearly three months already, her hair was matted and her eyes runny.

“I don’t push it with her,” Dave told me. “I figure if it’s not life threatening, it’s better that she gets to trust me first than force the issue just so she looks good. She won’t be adoptable for a long time, anyway.”

We set bowls of food and water in a corner of the room. Donna didn’t move; we stepped back and waited silently. Finally, after a couple of minutes, she hesitantly took her first steps into my world. As soon as she was out of the crate, she looked at Dave and me and raced for the hills. Glancing around at the layers of debris around me, I was convinced we’d never see her again.

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.