That was a very disturbing episode. I agree that the school teacher has a good chance of managing the hoarding going forward. How brave of her to agree to participate in the show when there could be backlash from her students’ parents.
Now, Vula’s absolute denial that she’d contributed in any way to the state of her house, or the death of those cats was mindblowing to me. Really, the TV was the problem? That’s what kept her from attending to the kittens?
Is success correlated with age on this show? Seems to me the older the person is, the more resistant they get and the more doubtful I am about their ability to reform.
Sounds about right. I remember that Kim and Aggie rarely worked with elderly people, and the few times they did, the impression I got was that the subjects were set in their ways, not to mention cranky. Not to say that some of the young or middle-aged subjects weren’t also cranky, but it seemed like the elderly subjects always were. (Also, I wonder if an old person on a pension, disability or other assistance might be taking a big risk going on one of these shows.)
Good God. I can’t believe that they are actually considering giving two cats back to her “after the cats are returned to health.” Why, so she can kill them again? She should be banned from ever owning any sort of pet again, ever, including hamsters and goldfish. I hope those clutter cleaner people got huge bonuses for that house.
I did love the editing, with the shot of the woman blaming the problem on the TV, and then the shot of the TV, surrounded by towering piles of junk. Yeah, the problem was all the TV there.
I don’t know how helpful it was to the situation, but I have to admit that it was viscerally satisfying to finally see someone just tell a hoarder, “No, this is completely disgusting, it’s covered in animal feces, and you may not have it back.” Yay for Matt the extreme clutter cleaner!
A few years back, I read of a horrible story from Rhode Island. A 12 year old boy was caught by a truant officer-he hadn’t attended school in over a year. When he took the kid home, he found his mother and grandmother living in squalor-cats running around, feces on the floor, fleas everywhere-and piles of junk. The weird thing was, the home was in an upscale condo development (>$500,000/unit), and the mother was employed as an executive secretary. The smell was so bad that the neighbors were complaining.
Yet the womqan hefd down a job and was highly thought of-weird.
It’s not hoarding, but I have to think that excessive cat collection is a related mental illness: about eight or so years ago, a woman bought a house in my hometown JUST to keep her cats. The woman lived in San Francisco, and drove up to my town, an hour away, to feed her cats every day.
Cops found out about it when someone threw a rock through a window and the smell got out. There were HUNDREDS of cats in the house. Turns out this was actually the second time this woman had done this - she’d previously had herself a cat house in the neighboring town over. She was arrested, got bailed out, and went on the freaking lam. She was eventually arrested in Florida, in a wig and sunglasses.
It was very, very weird.
Anyway, when the house went back on the market, after it had been cleaned a LOT, presumably, the asking price was $640,000.
The hoarding friend of mine has a great job, makes a nice salary and benefits, and her co-workers have no clue that she lives in a self-created landfill. They would never believe it unless they were to see it for themselves.
She was angry at herself, really. Yes, that stuff was perfectly fine when you bought it. The reason it’s all being jettisoned now is because you kept a house of filth. Bed, made, lie. (And FTR, Matt cursed first. But that’s why he’s awesome!)
Matt is the man. I love it when he lost it on Vula. You can only take so much soothing, let’s-be-reasonable talk from the therapists and organizers.
Scary to think that someone like Vula may truly be beyond help. I mean, your arm is swollen to grotesque proportions (and BTW, is that not a fitting metaphor for how her own possessions have swollen into an unmanageable burden?), they’re hauling dead cats out of your home by the bagful, and you don’t see why it’s “anyone else’s business” what state your house is in?
Anyway, I once lived with a slightly OCD woman with mild hoarding tendencies; in fact, I had bought her a book on it (Buried in Treasures) shortly before we broke up. The experience has given me a deep aversion to keeping things; if anything, I’m too quick to throw things away. But it makes Hoarders (and the other show on TLC) familiar viewing, albeit far more extreme than anything I experienced.
I was a bit confused regarding Vula’s arm. Her son said that she broke it and it healed improperly or something?
Regardless, I’m genuinely surprised that she’s alive. I thought living in a literal pile of feces would have killed her. While her obvious mental problems make her deserving of pity rather than scorn, I definitely don’t fault Matt for sticking up for himself. It’s one thing to be helpful and understanding; quite another to sit there and take her verbal abuse while she blames everyone else in the world for the toxic deathtrap she created.
More than any other, I think, that situation was grotesque. From the sheer filth of the residence to the skeletal, infirm cats hobbling around, to the cat corpses littering the place, it looked like something out of Clive Barker. Especially when coupled with Vula’s insistence that her plainly-malnourished cats looked just fine and that the garbage littering her floor (which was useless when she bought it, then became both useless and toxic) was valuable.
I’m as baffled as MsWhatsit that animal control (or whoever) would consider for a second giving a single animal back to her. The only possible rationale I can come up with is that it might be better to give her a couple healthy cats that are spayed/neutered and hope that Vula is satisfied with those and doesn’t feel the need to acquire any more. If she’s still shopping for things, though, I would be astonished if Vula isn’t still acquiring cats off the street or wherever and allowing them to run around and breed inside her house. This episode was only slightly “better” than that one from season one or two where the cleaning crew kept finding skeletal remains of entire litters of kittens.
As regards age, I think about this episode and the season one episodes featuring the woman who refused to throw away food and the man who had tons of scrap metal on his property. All were older and had total breakdowns during the cleaning process.
Lisa on the other hand seems like she’ll do okay and looks to have a good support system in the form of her boyfriend and sister. I’m not surprised she got testy after having to work with her (obnoxious) mother for a few hours. I don’t think I could work on anything with my mother for three hours and not be irritated beyond belief, let alone if she was going through my stuff and judging me for owning it.
It is hoarding. It’s just prefaced so it’s called “animal hoarding” whether it’s cats, dogs, birds, whatever. Cat hoarding seems to be most common, but it can be any animal. The criteria includes not necessarily “too many” as long as they are well cared for. But as soon as there is an inability to care for them all, proper housing, food, water, medical care, sanitation, then it can be considered a hoarding situation. It can be with as few as 4 cats in a senior situation where they truly can’t afford care or physically take care of them, but the senior won’t relinquish readily or admit there’s a problem.
I’ve seen it with dogs, cats, horses, birds, and ferrets!