Wow…you really can throw a cat over the house!
How do these people (cat horders) fall into such an incredibly filthy lifestyle? I have read accounst of houses full of cat faeces, with the walls and floors soaked in urin-and many of these pathetic people are flea-bitten and filthy. Yet somehow they manage to live this way. Does your sense of smell diminish when you are living like this?
A bit-they’re used to it, so they become immune to it. That and they’re mentally ill.
That could be downright luxurious compared to the lifestyle of a 17th-century peasant.
I kind of doubt that . . .
You have cause and effect reversed - cats send you crazy.
My guess is that animal hoarders don’t decide to live with so many animals that their houses end up filthy. The way they live is probably the result of many small bad decisions about individual animals. They may be incapable of seeing the big picture - taking on one more cat always seems like an incremental change, and they may see themselves as kind people who would never refuse shelter to a helpless animal.
There are many things like this, where a difference in degree is a difference in kind, and part of mental health is knowing where the limits are. Having one alcoholic drink a week isn’t a problem, but one an hour is. Eating a slice of pie once in a while is OK, but eating a whole pie every day isn’t. Adopting a kitten is fine, but adopting a kitten every month isn’t. For some reason, animal hoarders don’t have the mental trigger that says that, beyond some point, adopting another animal makes things worse, not better.
You may think you’re joking, but that may just be it: welcome to the psychological effects of Toxoplasma gondii.
I won’t argue the point to avoid hijacking the thread, but I recommend you catch a British TV series called The Worst Jobs in History, starring Tony (“Baldrick”) Robinson and compare the life of a crazy cat lady who might be living in her own house with light and heat and access to clean water with that of a Tudor woad-dyer.
Anyway, amplifying Jinx’s earlier comment, the cat hoarder may perceive that the animals love and depend on her, while contact with other humans has become impossible through isolation and deepening mental illness.