This week's Animal Oddity is about a serious and troubling topic: animal hoarding.
The recent success of several television shows dealing with the issue of hoarding is, I think, due to what I call the train-wreck effect. Getting to go behind the veil into the homes of people with extreme hoarding behavior is like looking at a horrible accident: it's traumatizing to see but you just can't look away.
Animal hoarding adds the additional elements of animal waste and the emotional impact of seeing animals suffer. Those things combined with the eccentricities of the hoarders themselves (beyond their hoarding behavior) and their usual obliviousness to the severity of the situation seem to be the perfect recipe for an odd new television format: uncomfortable entertainment.
Here's one example of what I'm talking about:
When I watch these shows, I can't help but imagine myself living like that, in those dirty, overcrowded homes teeming with animals (sometimes not all still alive) and their waste. They always make a point to mention the horrible odors in the homes of animal hoarders. Having worked in zoos and nature centers with animal collections, I can tell you first hand how quickly animal waste odors can build up if not cleaned immediately and regularly.
And of course, it breaks my heart to see those poor animals crammed into tiny, overcrowded cages, living in their own waste, or suffering from untreated illness and wounds. With animal hoarding, it's easy to hate the hoarders for inflicting such conditions on innocent animals.
I always try to remind myself that these people have an illness, and that they need treatment, not judgment and hate. Ultimately, that's the only thing that is going to help them and their animals out of their desperate situations. If nothing else, shows like A&E's Hoarders and Animal Planet's Confessions: Animal Hoarding have raised the awareness of the general public about this illness and hopefully continue to encourage more people who suffer from it to get treatment.
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May you someday be able heal your condition and achieve the spiritual evolvement that would allow you to understand that had these people been blessed with enough (if any) unconditional love, kindness and compassion from other human beings, they wouldn't, so desperately, be seeking it from animals.
To consider the public exploitation, embarrassment and humiliation of the mentally ill as entertainment is not only unconscionable, but a very tragic and frightening statement of what so much of humanity has become.
But there is no need to dance around the voyeurism that these shows (I didn't know the animal hoarders show existed) are plainly pandering to. Peeking in windows to see sordid, intimate details of "pet husbandry" is morally--and I hope-legally--indistinguishable from peeking through windows to see an exposed human behind (or "in front").
Tuning in to this show may not be peeking into windows. But the motivation would presumably be of the same moral quality.
Maybe it helps those who are a little bit sick feel better about themselves, to shove their nose into the lives of individuals still sicker.
Cancel your cable service but don't put up an antenna for broadcast TV. Your quality of life will improve. I gaurantee it.
The loneliness within must be strange and wild and galloping, a headless horse. And the things or animals that pile up, that enter the front door and don't leave, must serve as a wall of protection against the big bad world.
As it is, it's not just the animals these hoarders can't take care of, but themselves and their houses. It's as if something struggling to complete itself has been short circuited somehow.
And we look on in disgust, perhaps because we feel secretly superior or relieved that there's someone out there whose life has imploded in a way our disappointing lives never will; or maybe it's just that it's difficult, as this author said, to turn away from the horrifying carnival of it all.