Love is a strange thing and so is the human mind. Sometimes a person with a tender heart never learns to say no and against all reason and financial considerations creates just the kind of disaster that person hoped to prevent. Yes, sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind because kindness by itself can kill.
Someone, perhaps in a kindhearted effort to save unwanted pets, collected about 400 animals. Who that someone is, news reports haven't revealed.
Of that number, there were about 200 dogs, 30 cats, 40 chickens and turkeys, 100 goats and sheep, a llama, an emu and a hog. They were left there with no water except for pools of mud. According to reports, dead animals were found in wheelbarrows, cages and in the mud.
Local non-profits, The Gentle Barn and A Wish for Animals, came forward and are leading this rescue mission, beginning on 14 January 2008. Before I heard anything on the news, the message was out on the Internet, in Yahoo! groups and on Craigslist.
The number of animals is almost too much for either of those non-kill animals shelters to handle--alone or together. So there is a call for help--people to foster, people to give money and goods. There is a request for people to save these animals who have suffered the fate of many animals--not intentional cruelty, but the cruelty of neglect.
These animals are victims of a person who is what is now called an animal hoarder. For years there have been jokes about the cat lady and now, there's even a doll. I have known some cat ladies and dog ladies. There even was a man with too many tigers.
Yet to animal welfare and protection groups, these people, known as collectors, have long been a concern. Sometimes, someone well-known and respected from their own ranks falls into the trap of taking on too many animals, not being able to say no and fully believing that they are the only ones who can give these animals the proper care. In small towns or even large urban centers with an understaffed and underfunded animal shelter, confiscating the animals and keeping them until the court case is over--perhaps for as long as a year--can be a financial disaster. It also means less room for the normal annual influx of animals.
Article comments
1 - Cheri
The name of the 400 animal hoarder is Ivan George Callais. Gentle Barn has been removed from aiding.
Ivan has never been compassionate. Everytime he is caught he just moves to another location and starts again. He lives in a camper. In 2000 he was busted in Woodland Hills, CA with 70 dogs. New Leash on Life took all the dogs to temporary donated land and brought them back one by one when they were adopotable. Busted in 2004 in Gorman.
He uses the animals to get donations and then lives off the donations, while the animals suffer.
He is once again banned from adopting at LA City & County shelters. Check out.
The only love he has is for himself. Once again the rescue community must deal with his inhumane treatment of animals.
BE AWARE!
2 - Purple Tigress
I won't analyze the reasons he collects. I'll leave that to the experts at the HARC. Sometimes people just want attention or to be seen as inherently good or be praised because they are doing what seems to be good. I think most collectors move around only to begin again. I think some people do start collecting or breeding to make money, particularly in the case of pure breed dogs.
There are some dogs left over from two 2007 animal abuse cases in Houston and New York. The Houston collies have been divided between collie rescue non-profit organizations.
In Marshall, TX, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals rescued 200 animals, including dogs guinea pigs, bearded dragons and 26 hissing cockroaches.
Even hissing cockroaches can suffer neglect.
3 - Angry
I am an owner of a former "Gorman" dog, a dog that was so malnourished and unhealthy when they rescued him from this sick man back in 2004. I am appalled that he was never charged for the Gorman abuse and that he was allowed to just go on and do this all again. Why is he not in jail? Someone needs to explain that to me. I am disgusted.
4 - Purple Tigress
I followed a case in the late 1990s. The woman had moved from county to county or city to city. There is no national data base although the Website www.pet-abuse.com does a good job, it is an informal group.
In the past, animal hoarding, for whatever reason, wasn't taken very seriously as a social problem just as animal abuse wasn't seen as an early sign of deeper and more costly psychological problems in humans.
It is only recently that people have begun to study the problem of hoarding as they are now at Tufts and that law enforcement has recognized that the abuse and torture of animals often is a predictor of a person's probable evolution toward the abuse and torture of human victims.
Perhaps someday there will be a national animal abuse data base but for something like that to be effective various laws would need to be changed. In many cases, a person convicted of animal abuse is not prohibited from owning animals or if so, only within a certain city, precinct or district.
5 - AgentC
Cheri is probably Mrs. Mark Kriski, wife of the KTLA news man. Cheri used Ivan as a dogsitter and gave him money after his Woodland Hills incident. The Kriskis gave Ivan their dog to watch while they went on vacation time and time again. They knew he was an animal freak but still had no problem letting him watch over their pet.
6 - cat lover
Is there a fax number someone could anonymously report a neighbor who has a cage of cats & kittens, non seem to be neutered as a 5 day old kitten was found on a neighbors yard late one night. thank you
(Los Angeles 90046)
7 - needinfo
Is animal hoarding the same as animal breeding? Is a person who makes a formal statement to the authorities that she fully intended to board pure breed animals a hoarder? The case I refer to is recent and has been in the news. There were multiple animals dead and alive. All were pure breed. The conditions of the animals were filthy as well as the living conditions. Some died, some lived, some are still healing. This person had thrown away the dead dogs in the local dumpster. So, my question to you all is the above. Are hoarders and animal breeders such as this person one in the same? I am confused.