For Improved Cat Hoarding Awareness

Fark.com, as hopefully everyone knows, is the best place to get news. Fark allows odd news stories from various regions to be concentrated into a central location. These stories are the kinds of things you might read in your local paper but almost never see on national news. Something I realized today is that, as a result, Fark makes us aware of human behavior patterns that we might otherwise miss. For example, cat hoarding.

Headlines like “today’s house with 300 cats brought to you by X” show up on Fark with remarkable regularity. On a local level, cat hoarding might seem like a peculiar, isolated incident, but with the advent of Fark, we can see that it is in fact something of a national mini-epidemic. People hoard pets all the time. There are hundreds of pet hoarders out there. It’s a legitimate psychological disorder.

So there’s another benefit of the Internet. It allows us to discover how truly freaky we really are. Pet hoarding just scratches the surface if you consider that the Internet also allows people with niche fetishes to come together more easily.

7 thoughts on “For Improved Cat Hoarding Awareness”

  1. not quite a psychological disorder…would have to be in the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). so you cant put it as an Axis 1 disorder or bill for treatment or anything… but it definitely Sounds crazy 🙂
    the bored-at-work mental health professional

  2. Give it time, maybe it will be in there. Tufts.edu refers to it as a “complex disorder which has until recently not received serious attention by medical, mental health, and public health professionals.”

  3. but its not Currently ” a legitimate psychological disorder.” hehe, i have a thing with being right, maybe its a disorder 🙂

    my educated guess would be that many such hoarders have other diagnosable stuff going on, perhaps depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, OCD, etc…

  5. It’s a little unfair to criticize Colter for not using the phrase “psychological disorder” in the technical sense intended by the authors of the DSM. He hasn’t represented himself as a clinical psychologist, and so he’s most likely using the phrase in an informal, colloquial way.

    I’m definitely in favor of writing and speaking precisely — as a technical person, I recognize that specialized, narrow definitions of common terms allow professionals in a field to be confident that they’re talking about the same things. But specialized terms *do* bleed into the vernacular, and when they do, they become less specific. I see no reason to correct imprecision when it’s harmless, which this post pretty definitely is.

  6. My bass player’s wife has 14 dogs, 3 cats and a parrot, so you’re fine, Kathy.

    And yeah, Heath, Katie was just being delightfully OCD. Which of course is not an acronym, but an “initialization”…though it’s not in any dictionary for that use. Seeing as how I’m making up a new definition for a word, I figure I might as well run around making up psychological disorders.

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