Confessions: Animal Hoarding

This show, I rarely watch reality but because I am a Mom to three shar-pei, I do watch the animal hoarding shows. A lot of reasons people hoard is due to OCD or depression. Please get help.

It is understandable but sad and tragic. The episode on Animal Planet last night where the man adopts a horde of mastiffs after the tragic loss of his young wife Kim. The dogs are so sweet, yet too big for him to care for, and he also neglects his health as he is on a cardiac pacemaker. His daughter helps him to get medical help, but the psychological issues are so much deeper.

The other couple, a woman with seven dogs and twenty-seven cats. While it seems excessive, her heart is in the right place. She lost her brother to kidney failure. She is very distraught and her marriage starts to unravel. Her therapy is to drive to strip malls and look for stray cats, she brings them back to her house to "rescue" them.

This is a complex psychological issue, so please do not judge until you have gone through a tragic accident or death in the family. A great deal of these people have no coping skills, it manifests in some way...sometimes in that they try to help animals with no support system.

At least the show has redeeming qualities in that the people get real help: there is a heart to it. It's not just reality trash and celebrities. Recommended.

I thought this show was very revealing of people with this disorder. It became obvious many of them have depression or addictive tendencies or personality disorders. I had the impression the show helped them get treatment. This show exposed how people who want to "save" others, animals or people, aren't motivated merely by altruism. I didn't think this show was exploitive because it helped the participants, especially the family and friends who were at their wits' end. I did wonder how the producers found out about these cases and whether their shooting of the shows might have delayed some legal action...I would like to know more about how this show was produced.

And that's a good thing! I love Hoarders, and I really enjoyed CAH too, but Hoarders feels much more exploitative of its hoarders. CAH shows the dismal living quarters without the dramatic edits, but also gives the families of hoarders support in the form of a therapist (who usually facilitates an intervention).

It's really refreshing to see people with severe mental illness being treated like people, but ALSO to see these same people face the consequences of their actions. Usually positive change came about too, but it did feel disingenuous from some hoarders at times.

Overall, if you like Hoarders, there's a good chance you'll like this program too. It's less dramatic and engaging, but still interesting and awe-inspiring at times.

Animal hoarding, a serious bona fide concern, is portrayed as a formulaic, Opera Buffo, freak-show farce! Here, two hoarders are BOTH stereotyped as stupid and fat...well, fat but very "nice"--gotta have that empathy factor, right? 1)"Bonnie", an obese diabetic, asthmatic lives with her mother and obese forty-year old son who lost his house to foreclosure, and now lives in her basement. The house is overrun with cute, yappy little dogs which she refuses to let outside. Ammonia and fecal dust permeate the air. 2)For six months, a man hasn't cleaned up his home, a 30-cat, pee-on-every-wall, litter-box. His wife has kidney problems and he dearly loves and misses so very, very much, but she can't return to a potentially infectious environment. 3)Poop and pee, yuks and eeyews, concerned experts and relatives, tears and interventions and great big yawns for viewers.

The show as a show is educational and done well enough. However you get pissed quickly with how often you hear, 'poor them they need assistance they can't help themselves.' The people portrayed have little money, don't clean, have too many animals, and are just living in terrible situations. You feel bad for the animals but not the people who the show tries to get you to feel bad for. I only felt bad for the families having to deal with these people.