Media Review: Animal Hoarders!

While vacationing in Taos, NM with my best friend M. I had the occasion to experience some truly devastating television. The house where we were staying had satellite, because you need a satellite dish if you want to watch anything up there.

So, because we grew up in the 70's and still think they play old movies on late night TV, we began our viewing at 10pm. Flipping through infomercials, we finally found an actual program on the Animal Planet channel called "Animal Hoarders".

"Animal Hoarders" featured the stories of two damaged souls who engage in the practice of animal hoarding. I am not sure if this practice is in the DSM IV-TR, but I am confident that it will appear in the DSM V. Basically animal hoarding involves keeping ridiculous numbers of domestic animals in your house. It usually also involves said animals using your house as a toilet and spreading disease to you and to each other.

One of the two characters was a 60 year old obese woman with asthma recovering from the loss of her husband. As succor for her woes she hoarded long-haired Chihuahuas in the house where she lived with her mother and her mentally ill son (who was frequently pictured eating donuts or staring blankly at the ceiling from his single bed). She went to the pet store for fun, to look at squeaky toys.

The second and perhaps more depressing character in the Animal Hoarding program was male and in his fifties. He worked at a drug and alcohol rehab center for an hourly wage. After his wife had a liver transplant, she was forced to leave the house where she lived with her husband and five cats, as her doctor feared that she was weak to potential infection which the cats might be catalysts for (unintentional punning). Well once she moved out, her husband lost control. The cats, who were not fixed started mating with each other: creating other cats. You know how it goes. In the end, the man, who at one point referred to himself as a "poor slob" was living with over 20 cats who were defecating, urinating, mating and dying all over his tract home. One ossified cat was found behind the couch when he gave himself over to Animal Control.

It was hard to know what was worse: the fact that these two people had such problems, or that

media culture likes to make a spectacle of such people. Perhaps the issue is that our culture facilitates both these problems and their ridicule. The program itself with its lurid inter-titles "The hoarding can't be stopped. The cats are reproducing without end!" and close-ups of devastated middle american "losers" were frankly more nauseating than all the cat shit and dog pee.