Nick Neave in Newsweek on why animal hoarding stays hidden

Celeste, a Chihuahua rescued from a hoarding situation alongside 36 other dogs, has drawn over 155,000 views on TikTok. In the clip, filmed at the Humane Society of North Texas, she leaps for a shelter worker’s arm as she is placed back in her kennel. Kelly Rybarczyk, a behaviour trainer at the shelter, told Newsweek that Celeste arrived shaking, and would growl and bite if touched. Months of patient work followed. She was adopted last week.

The rescue began with what Rybarczyk described as two Chihuahuas that ballooned to close to 40. The front door of the property was broken, and the dogs were living as a feral pack, running in and out. Many lacked hair through flea dermatitis, and all showed internal and external parasites. Rybarczyk described the house as covered in inches of urine and faeces on every surface.

Prof Nick Neave, director of Northumbria University’s Hoarding Research Group and Chair of the UK Hoarding Partnership, was approached by Newsweek for the piece. He told Newsweek that object hoarding is often rooted in childhood trauma and neglect, and that animal hoarding is more intuitive to grasp because attachment to animals is a familiar human experience. The difficulty, he said, is that people who hoard animals often report loving them deeply while failing to care for them adequately. One of the reasons the research base is thin is that animal hoarders “do not engage at all with researchers.”