Animal Hoarding: One Dog’s Story

You may think that as the daughter of the compulsive hoarder, I’d have the ability to spot other hoarding situations very easily. But that’s not the case. Simply because immediately after we adopted our dog, it was years before we realized the poor pooch had likely originate from an animal hoarder.
We knew we wanted a rescue dog and we knew he or she had to be small and portable, so we could bring him going with us. On a web site that makes it possible for users to find animals by age, size, and gender, we entered our criteria and up popped a photo of a one-year-old black Chihuahua-miniature pinscher mix, with significant eyes and enormous bat-like ears.

The dog’s name was Milton. The girl who ran the shelter, Penny, explained that when he was a few months old Milton was brought to a veterinarian because one of his legs was broken. The veterinarian set his leg, however the couple who’d dropped him off never returned to claim him. So, Penny told me, he’d been living in the vet’s office for the last year. I figured he frolicked all day with the other animals being treated or boarded there and that he’d been fed nicely and gotten lots of attention from staff and consumers. It didn’t sound like a poor life.

But when we met him for that very first time–at Penny’s husband’s office, due to the fact she claimed there is “too much going on at her house”–Milton’s lengthy, deer-like snout was occur a grim frown, his large ears flattened against his head as if he wanted to be additional streamlined for flight. I was sitting on the floor. I reached over, picked him up, and hang him on my thigh; he clung there, his lengthy claws digging into my jeans, as if he’d lastly discovered a secure raft on a violent ocean.

He smelled like death, and every one of his ribs were visible.
What type of veterinarian’s office had be been residing in, I wondered.
My husband asked Penny directly.

“I told Jessie already,” Penny said. “He was in a veterinarian’s office. It is where I take my other rescues. I kept seeing him there in the small cage”
“In a cage?” David and I said at the identical time. I reached down and covered poor people dog with my palms. I’d a feeling he’d been inside the cage the entire year he was there, almost certainly twenty-four hours each day.
We brought him house, bathed him, fed him, and changed his name to Abraham Lincoln apparently he’d only been called Milton for that week the ad was up; just before that he just had no name.

Years later, while researching my book, I found that oftentimes animal hoarders will cloak their behavior behind the pretense of running a “shelter,” and will occasionally sell some of their charges for dollars to feed the rest. I started questioning about Penny. Her story about Abraham Lincoln living at a veterinarian’s office just didn’t seem sensible. And her automobile had been packed with clutter. Then there is the reality that we had to meet “Milton” at her husband’s office rather than her house. And his putrid smell. As a small, short-haired dog he shouldn’t have smelled like this. Also, the very first few times we took him for walks he looked startled and cowered when the wind blew, as if he’d in no way been outside in his life. And his weight: In the 1st couple of months with us, his ribs became less and less visible as he went from seven and a half pounds to nine pounds, then ten.

I searched our entire apartment, but I couldn’t find Penny’s phone number anywhere. Nor her email address. I didn’t even remember the name of Penny’s organization. I must have tossed out her contact information in the course of one of my purges. Regrettably, I’ll probably never know the truth about that initial year of Abraham Lincoln’s life.

If I were within the exact same scenario these days, I’d know much better. And it is not just me: Awareness of animal hoarding behavior is increasing probably thanks simply to the reality shows about hoarding and as a result, more animals are being saved from horrific circumstances. Recently i interviewed Gia, who works in neuro-scientific animal rescue, and in my next article she’ll explain why individuals hoard animals, how you can recognize the signs of an animal hoarding scenario, and what you can do to assist.