My View: No excuse for hoarding animals - Opinion - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL

Opinion piece request action by Boone County Board.

By Karen Gadke
Stateline Spay/Neuter & Education Fund

Posted Jun. 20, 2015 at 2:30 PM

I refer to an article published in the May 31 Rockford Register Star: "Stephenson County case spotlights national problem," which deals with the recent Stephenson County pet hoarding case. In a Feb. 22 Opinion column I explained how hoarding usually begins and suggested ways to prevent hoarding situations, namely, by not supporting overbreeding. Pet overpopulation as well as pet dumping by some people makes it too easy to pick up abandoned pets.

In your May 31 article mental health expert Elspeth Bell proposes mental health issues as reasons for hoarding. I agree with that opinion, but this expert’s tone is typical for the time we live in, namely, excuses are often made for criminal acts committed “due to temporary insanity.” With this attitude, many wrongdoers end up being set free with a “slap on the wrist.”

Ms. Bell’s “prescription” is to put the animal hoarder in contact with the proper resources to help her. Of course hoarders need mental health treatment. But this does not change the fact that Ms. McKinnon, the hoarder in question here, needs to take responsibility for what she did to defenseless creatures. In my opinion, while she is being treated for her mental instability, she needs to be locked up because all the stray cats and dogs on the streets present the temptation to start hoarding all over again. She may not have seen all the filth, but she could not have been blind to all the dogs and cats in pain, starving and dying, and that’s plain cruelty. This cannot be written off as “not her fault.”

On the subject of overbreeding, many groups and individuals are doing their best to educate the public and subsidize spay/neuter, especially of cats breeding out of control. Some more humane and progressive communities have free spay/neuter available, but many just continue the “catch and kill” system, often by massive poisoning of cats, which can include wild critters and people’s family pets.

Boone County Animal Services is doing a good job of catching stray dogs and either re-homing or adopting out those whose owners can not be found, euthanizing only unadoptable ones. But there is no help for cats. There is no space for cats at Animal Services, and private shelters are overflowing.

Stateline Spay/Neuter & Education Fund, working with other groups, has been working hard to catch and sterilize as many feral and barn cats as possible, and mailing out family pet spay/neuter vouchers to reduce vet bills for pets. But without more help, the situation remains out of control; every day more litters are born and, sadly, most of those kittens will have to die. The Boone County Board has not shown much interest in companion animals. (The shelter that will soon be built was voted in by a compassionate public agreeing to a small tax increase, not the County Board).

Page 2 of 2 - I suggest that the Boone County Board to start taking an interest in and becoming educated about the situation, then do something to support cat sterilization so we can stabilize the population. Those of us who are trying to reduce cat numbers by sterilizing as many as we can will continue, but if we do not get help, there will be many more hoarding situations, and county government will have to pay a lot more to clean up the dreadful messes than it would cost to take an interest now in preventing them.

My View: No excuse for hoarding animals - Opinion - Rockford Register Star - Rockford, IL