Informant38

Near Lyles, Tennessee, the shelterless Hickman County Humane Society just before Christmas 1998 seized 299 dogs, 38 horses, and various cats from an alleged puppy mill reportedly owned by one Patricia Adkisson.

The site was littered, rescuers said, with the remains of dead dogs.

On January 1, 1999, hoping to keep a developing neglect case from becoming self-perpetuating, Florida Humane Society volunteers cleaned the home of widower Terry Ruppel, 70, of Lighthouse Point, who surrendered 37 cats after neighbors complained about filth and stench. Ruppel and his wife of 47 years exhausted their savings trying to fix up an old house, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel staff writer Robert George explained. Then Ruppel had a stroke, skin cancer, and kidney cancer, and in August 1998 his wife died of a sudden heart attack.

"Ruppel sold his truck so he could fly her home to Illinois for a funeral among family," George reported. "Then he retreated into his home and turned to his cats to soothe the loneliness that settled upon him. He let them climb in his bed so they could purr him to sleep. They crawled over him as he sat, hour after hour, in front of the television. He was too tired to clean up after them. 'I didn't have the gumption,' Ruppel said."

Because Ruppel accepted help and gave up the animals, observers think he may keep a pledge to avoid repeating the situation.

District judge L. Vern Robinson of Jones County, Iowa, on December 4, 1998 ordered the immediate slaughter of 315 starving pigs who were seized from Piggy Bar Farms, near Wyoming, Iowa, on October 30. Owner Daryl Larson, 46, of Delmar, Iowa, was previously in trouble for starving as many as 3,000 pigs in 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1997 at other locations in both Iowa and Missouri. Fined $16,311 for the 1995 Missouri case, Larson in February 1998 sought to avoid payment by declaring bankruptcy. This time Larson was charged only with misdemeanor neglect, carrying a maximum penalty of a year in jail and a fine of $1,500.

The Arizona Humane Society in mid-November euthanized 160 cats and filed 201 misdemeanor cruelty counts against Charlotte Brees, 56, who ran the Arizona Cat Rescue Association, incorporated in 1984, from her home. Hired two weeks earlier, cleaning person Rosalie Thurston reportedly called humane authorities upon becoming aware that the mess she confronted was not just the result of a short-term crisis.

Robert Mock, of Junglesong Cattery in Rochester, Washington, in a history of the short-legged Munchkin variant of the ocelot-marked "ocicat," credits Laurie Bobskill of West Springfield, Massachusetts, as one of the "notable breeders" who established Munchkins on the show circuit.

But Bobskill, 47, a longtime reporter for the Springfield Union-News, and single parent of a 17-year-old son, turned from breeding to cat rescue circa 1992. She called ANIMAL PEOPLE occasionally to request information about cat-related matters, including how to tell animal hoarders from rescuers, and sometimes distributed free samples of ANIMAL PEOPLE at cat shows.

"We thought of her as a reporter who was animal-friendly and wanted to help cats," said Massachusetts SPCA vice president Carter Luke. In July 1996, however, Bobskill surrendered 126 cats to the MSPCA and cleaned her home at town request. The incident was not publicized. Then, on October 23, 1998, police and the Baystate Gas Company came to shut off Bobskill's gas line due to unpaid bills. Finding "feces piled against the doorway," wrote Bobskill's Union-News colleague Natasha Gural, the police called the MSPCA and city health director Albert Laboranti, who placarded the site as unfit for habitation. The MSPCA took out 58 live cats, three dead cats, and a dog.

ANIMAL PEOPLE learned of the incidents when Bobskill called on November 12, 1998, to allege MSPCA persecution
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Alleged puppy miller, widower, farmer, rescuer, show breeder/rescuer, alleged real-life Norman Bates, or alleged messianic survivalist, the alleged perpetrators in all seven pending cases appear to have in common that they exemplify traits which seem to be shared by most persons who are accused of animal hoarding, according to ANIMAL PEOPLE findings in an analysis of media reports on 688 recent U.S. alleged hoarding cases, involving 661 individuals.

The commonalities are not unique to animal hoarders, however. They also seem to be shared by others who hoard or neglect either individual nonhuman animals or dependent humans, or just obsessively gather trash. The term "animal hoarder" is a recent modification of the more familiar term "animal collector." Noticing that people who hoard animals tend to share quirks with trash hoarders, Tufts University Center for Animals and Public Policy director Gary Patronak recommends that "animal hoarder" be used instead of "animal collector" to help distinguish the hoarding pathology from the often equally obsessive but harmless quests of people who merely collect objects as a hobby, and/or have many healthy pets