When I was growing up, we had two cats that each lost an eye in a fight. She never got them medical attention. A cat had most of her jaw blown off with a firecracker, and lived, without medical attention.

The basement was used for one dog that she didn’t like, which she left to defecate and urinate all over the floors. It was covered in waste. There was not a single square inch that wasn’t covered in the dog’s filth. The dog eventually grew an extremely large tumor on her underside that she dragged behind her, and then of course died.

The first and second floors of the house are always crawling with cats and kittens. There’s been multiple times where a litter was born and my mother didn’t know about it for weeks. There’s only one litter box for all those cats, so as you can imagine, the cats find other places to go. The carpets are stained, the furniture is stained, and the smell sticks with you.

My ex husband was staying with my parents temporarily, working at a factory and he smelled so horribly they actually fired him. I’ve called the cops, I’ve called animal shelters, and I’ve called hospitals and legal agencies to get her help. No such luck.

My mother denies she has a problem. She actually thinks it’s funny. She has named every single cat, and she knows each and every personality.

She has a shrine set up in her house to her favorite dog, with a statue, and his ashes. If he wasn’t suffering from mange when he passed, I’m sure she would have had him stuffed.

One time, several years ago, I had gone to her house, and she tried jamming my hand in the box of ashes, telling me “PET YOUR BROTHER!”. Another time, the cops came out to her house (for something unrelated to the hoarding, but related to her mental disorder), and one of the cops literally ran out of the house, vomiting from the stench.

I don’t speak with my mother anymore. She claims I’m the one with the problem.

I felt sick every time we went to visit my grandmother, because of the smell and the sight of all those sick and starving cats. Finally, a few years before she died, her adult son gathered up all her cats, hauled them off, and shot them. (Pretty awful way to deal with it, in my opinion, but he wasn’t a very stable person.) He told her that if she ever got another cat, he would shoot it too. She never had another pet.

I love cats, but because of her I will never keep more than one at a time.

Nature’s Miracle and Kilz primer. My Mom and Dad bought a house last year from a lady that was a borderline hoarder. It was awful. Nature’s Miracle was used to clean all hard surfaces thoroughly. We were cleaning appliances, cabinets, walls, floors, doors… it was awful.

Then we went around with a UV light wand (you can buy those at a Pet Store) and recleaned any spots that glittered with that light. ALL carpet had to be ripped out and replaced, with the subfloor cleaned prior to replacement (any spots that wouldn’t come up on the subfloor were sealed with Kilz primer). All the walls had to be repainted with a couple layers of Kilz Primer after cleaning, then fresh paint over that. The baseboards had to be scrubbed with Nature’s Miracle and Mom hired a crew to come in and clean out all the A/C vents (which had cat feces in them).

It was a lot of work, but the Nature’s Miracle was the ONLY thing that got the reeking cat pee smell gone. I’m a cat lover (I have 5 myself) and I cannot abide by the smell of cat pee. Nature’s Miracle is the only thing I’ve ever seen that really actually works. My parent’s home has no cat odor now, so this did work… it just took a lot of labor to get it back to the way a house should be.

Good luck!

She explained that in her case, she started out taking in strays, and then the word got out that she was a cat-helper. So people started giving her their cast-off cats, or strays they found. At some point there was this moment when she realized she had way too many cats, but she also didn’t know what to do with them, aside from keep taking care of them. Somehow dealing with the cats became a full-time job, and lacking the income from a paying job, she found herself going into debt to support the cats.

The interesting wrinkle is that she worked with a local laboratory (may have been a university, I forget at this point) which was researching some particular cat disease. She kept the bodies of any cats that died in a freezer, then delivered them to this lab for research (and there were quite a few that died — presumably of natural causes — given the total number of cats we’re dealing with). Apparently this contributed to the charges against her — she was found with x number of live cats, and y number of frozen corpses.

Anyway, she seemed like a genuinely nice person who had let a situation get way out of hand, and hadn’t managed to call a halt to it. It reminded me a lot of your typical addict story — starting small, then getting carried away, then losing touch with reality and just servicing the habit.

1. she is in danger of becoming a true hoarder.

2. she does not yet fit the pathology–the cats are well cared for, the males are neutered, and they are not starving. they appear to be conditioned to respond enthusiastically, just like my cats do when i come back from walking the dog. he gets meds in cheese, followed by a biscuit. the cats think they should have an après promenade snack as well.

this document has a suitable description of the pathologies of three sub-types on: http://www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa/hoarding/pubs/AngellReport.pdf.