Animal hoarding is animal cruelty

The stench was enough to make a Rio Rancho police officer’s eyes water and his stomach turn.

What he saw in the home on High Desert Circle that day in May 2007, was even more sickening.

Moldy dishes, many broken, were strewn on the kitchen floor, the table, the beds and tossed in a sink of cold, murky water, according to a Rio Rancho criminal complaint. Clothing, trash, rotting food, pet carriers and old prescription bottles cluttered every room.

And then there were the cats.

Fourteen of them, crawling and hissing, their feces hardened on mattresses and carpeting, their urine soaked into bed pillows and sheets. Feces caked every inch of one bedroom floor as if the room had been turned into a litter box and then forgotten.

Santa Fe County authorities this week removed 48 dogs from the Edgewood home of Debra Clopman, a veterinarian whose license was revoked last year. (Courtesy of KOAT-TV)

The home belonged to a 56-year-old woman and her 32-year-old daughter – who were, oddly enough, housekeepers by trade. Both seemed oblivious to the smell and the squalor that surrounded them.

Taken that day from the home were all but one particularly stealthy cat, an old dog and a 13-year-old girl, the younger woman’s daughter.

The pets went to nearby animal shelters; the girl went to her father’s home. And the two women – Joann Valentine and daughter, Jennifer Sandstrom – went to court on charges of child abuse and animal cruelty.

Both received probationary sentences; Sandstrom was ordered not to possess pets other than the old dog, which belonged to her mother.

Yet two years later, court records show, they were ordered out of a home in Paradise Hills Knolls they had allowed to be overrun with at least four cats, the feces so pervasive it clogged the air vents.

These women were not the first animal hoarders I had ever reported on. But they were the first I ever had the chance to ask why they hoarded.

“We love animals,” Sandstrom told me.

Which answered nothing.

Another case of animal hoarding made the headlines this week, this one involving 48 dogs, many of them sickly, on a property at Dusty Trail in Edgewood.

The dogs’ owner, Debra Clopton, 48, had also been in trouble with the law after Rio Rancho police found at least 10 dogs and several cats in a home there that she apparently abandoned when she moved to Edgewood sometime within the past two months.

Presumably Clopton, who was a practicing veterinarian before her license was revoked last year, loved animals, too.

But this is a sick kind of love, a confusing, complex love that harms and potentially kills the objects of affection.

“I think this is one of the saddest forms of animal cruelty, and there is no other term for it other than animal cruelty, because the intention is usually a good one,” said Nancy Marano, editor and writer for PETroglyphs, a New Mexico publication for animal lovers. “But to cause animals so much pain and suffering when you want to do something good is incomprehensible.”

Marano is among my cadre of animal aficionados whom I asked to weigh in on the matter of animal hoarding. An estimated 900 to 2,000 new cases occur every year in the United States, affecting a quarter of a million animals, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Lisa Jennings, executive director of Animal Protection of New Mexico, said that while hoarding seems to be more prevalent these days, it’s actually been a problem for years.

It has, however, been in the public eye more because of cable TV shows like “Confessions: Animal Hoarding” and news stories, both of which have helped spread an awareness of hoarding as a sickness, not just a crime.

“What has changed is that the general public is more aware that those who hoard animals usually have a mental condition that prompts them to hoard and not see the misery for what it is,” Jennings said. “And that they need help.”

But Santa Fe animal activist Yvette Dobbie cautions that while animal hoarders may have a mental illness, they still need to be held accountable.

“Animal hoarding is a severe form of animal abuse that deserves special legislative attention,” she said. “Enacting hoarding-specific legislation would help ensure better prevention, protection and prosecution.”

The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium at Tufts University, founded in 1997, calls hoarding an attempt to satisfy a human need to accumulate and control animals. It’s a need that is stronger than the needs of the animal.

And that’s why hoarders cannot see that what they are doing is not loving animals but torturing them, slowly, painfully.

“What we do know is that if the person does not get some sort of psychological treatment, some sort of after-care or monitoring, the chances of recidivism are very high,” Jennings said.

My experts say it’s important to reach out early to suspected hoarders, to educate the public on how to spot hoarders and report them, to provide treatment. That, they say, could save not just the animals but the humans as well.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal