A Hoarder's Tale: How One Shanghai Animal Hoarder is Surviving His Disorder
Contributed by: thewooster
Up in Baoshan district is an old renovated factory space. No industrial workers mill about here though. The 200 sq. meters of concrete are instead home and playground for its more than 100 tenants.
On our visit, they readily ambled out into the open-air back room, where the warm sunshine had enticed them to stretch their bodies and seek out new playmates among their human guests. Healthy, happy, these cats are the survivors.
Six years ago, Second Chance Animal Aid got a call from a Shanghainese woman who was moving to the United States. She had been supporting a man named Huang Yunhao (pictured above) who housed more than 200 cats in his home two hours outside of Shanghai and had no other line of financial support. Could SCAA help?
Assistance came on the terms that Huang would add no new animals, that SCAA would humanely euthanize any animals that were beyond help and that the non-profit organization would create a better environment for the animals. Huang accepted the conditions and moved closer to central Shanghai so SCAA could better assist him. In 2009, the cats were moved to the factory space they occupy today, with their owner residing nearby. A dozen had been adopted out, the rest euthanized. They number half of their original count now.
That Huang, 56, has followed SCAA's terms, with plenty of regular monitoring, has become a rare success story in dealing with cat hoarders. The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium defines hoarding as a complex disorder characterized by an atypical number of companion animals, plus "an inability to provide minimal standards of care, with this neglect often resulting in starvation, illness and death" compounded by a denial of this inability.
Huang, assesses SCAA ...
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