http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/sep03/171083.asp?format=print
I guess the best you can say is that at least the cats weren’t starving.
But hell, it was a house worth $144,000. That’s a pretty expensive litter box.
I don’t think they’ll be able to get that much for it…
God, stories like this depress me. Poor kitties, and poor neighbors! 
Reminds me of something I saw on Animal Cops on Animal Planet the other night. The Detroit SPCA went into a derelict house and brought out over 300 cats. 300! And most of the poor things had to be put down because they were too feral or too sick to be rehabilitated.
MetalMaven
EEP! The guy is going in with more traps and expects another batch of kitties.
:eek
I was watching Animal Planet a couple weeks ago. If I recall correctly it was 250 cats in a house in Detroit. An I swear I could smell the stink just from tv.
We had neighbors like this. 50 cats and a falling down house but they “loved” their pets too much to give them up. The smell met you as you walked past.
The Bay Area had a case of a wealthy woman, Marilyn Baretta, who had bought a house in Petaluma solely to hoard cats. There were over 200 there when authorities discovered the house.
Here’s a link to the article about her.
Doctors actually call this “animal hoarding” and they say it’s similar to a drug addiction:
This same woman was caught hoarding cats in Sebastopol in the 1970s and in Novato in the mid-1990s. The link I posted above is an interesting read.
As someone who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder AND who loves cats, I sometimes fear that someday I’LL become a hoarder.
Yes, but announcing this fear on the SDMB isn’t what I would call a “crafty strategy to keep other people from seeing the problem” - so you’re OK. 
Out here there was couple (not even old, 30s). They had like 70 something live cats in their house, and 84 or 89 dead ones in a big old chest freezer. Sad thing is they had to put down all the live ones due to some disease they couldn’t allow into the pound.
Sounds like they were trying to stock up to start a chinese restaurant.
You would think that as bad as it smells to us, the cats would just be ready to puke…
Let’s see…
The woman died six years ago. Surely her home was included in the estate, and the estate has been through probate.
So, why wasn’t the house sold?
Now, FWIW, I heard on the radio yesterday that the niece of the woman who died said that her aunt never had cats, but didn’t have one dog.
So, if that’s true, has this woman’s son been using his inheritance to feed his cat addiction?
Oh, and bubba? I trust you meant to put a wink or a smiley face at the end of your last comment.
Oops…that supposed to be did have one dog.
Racist much? :rolleyes:
I have a dear friend who has 30 cats, all of whom have feline leukemia or AIDS. Fortunately, as they pass away, she has stopped getting more, so the number is slowly decreasing. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of worse things to come.
Esprix
**
Oversensitive much? :rolleyes:
sorry for the hijack but…
(bolding mine)
Umm… I hope you mean FIV, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, which is considered sort of analogous to AIDS in cats. It’s actually not very contagious between cats (only a deep bite wound from a carrier can do it, not intercourse) and can’ tspread to people at all. There is a lot of misinformation out there about FIV and it is sort of a pet peeve with me- I had an FIV+ cat for a few years that my mom rescued from the shelter where she worked. All of his health problems turned out to be unrelated (he had bad teeth and magneseium and taurine deficiencies from being fed on table scraps). None of my other cats ever tested positive, even after fighting with the positive one a few times.
Here’s the first link that showed up, and it confirms my experiences.
That lecture given, keeping tons of cats is a dangerous and slipery slope. I currently have 2, and don’t plan to get another until one of them is no longer with me, hopefully quite a while now. last night I hung out at the apartment of a FOAF who has an 8 year old son and I think 7 cats, plus 3 kittens remaining from a recent litter. It was quite disgusting. She has chronic fatigue syndrome, and is on welfare or workers’ comp or something (does not work), and was talking about how she’s all out of litter and nearly out of cat food but can’t buy any until she gets her check next week. SICK! The baby kitties have fleas eating them alive, and I had to have my friend physically restrain me from taking them home to get them healthy. My friend and I are seriously debating whether to call the humane society’s abuse investigator on her. She knows that she can’t handle them, but they are each her precious babies, and she can’t bear the thought of losing any of them… I am also worried about her son, for many of the same reasons.
I am the support staff for two cats, and maybe a couple of others OUTSIDE. It is nice to have a cat on your lap while on the computer, but this is a bit overboard.
finette, thanks for the clarification. She probably just uses AIDS as a shorthand as most folks likely wouldn’t know what FIV means.
And Azael, no, I don’t think I’m oversensitive. As my partner is API, and most of my friends are, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to call someone on perpetuating racist stereotypes.
Esprix