Anyone Else See This?

Willowy said:

I didn't say it was never mental illness. . .just that it's not ALWAYS mental illness. I have met hoarders who definitely showed signs of it being a mental illness. And I've met other people who "hoarded" animals like this and it was not noticably a mental illness. Just a situation that got out of control and they don't have the life skills to do anything about it. Usually true hoarders will get more animals (or whatever they're hoarding) right away after getting cleaned out, but those who aren't true hoarders don't.

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IMO, even if it isn't apparent, some sort of mental illness would have to be involved for a situation to get this bad. I mean, reckless, irresponsible, ignorant people can accidentally overbreed or neglect their animals. But in situations where animals are never going outside and therefore must be defecating in the house (and continuing to live amongst it), where MANY more animals than a single person could care for are present and no effort is made to prevent continued breeding even for reasons of practicality, when a dog has kibbles caked to the inside of their deformed mouth and no one seems to notice a problem? I just don't buy it that ANY fully functioning adult would let it get that bad. Many obvious warning signs were missed that no normal person could possibly be ignorant enough to miss.

And obviously the goal of treatment for hoarders would be to help them stop acquiring more animals/objects etc. I don't think it makes sense to say that a person could never have been a hoarder just because they are in recovery. But anyway, I don't think the article even mentioned if the person acquired more dogs after the rescue or not.