Hoarding
Terrierman mentioned that A&E (telly) is having a show on hoarders. It appears to be a seriers that starts Monday Nov 2, and will run on Monday nites for at least 7 weeks.
Terrierman invited comments. We shall see if that was foolish or not. Most people, who recognise that they are hoarders, probably aren't going to gripe "What's wrong with being a hoarder"?
But I've hung around enough dog show people and some cat shows, to know, way beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there are plenty of people who do NOT believe that having a house full of animals makes them hoarders.
I had a friend who used to quote someone else as saying "I ONLY have 200 dogs!" My friend thought that 200 dogs was a lot of dogs, but my friend had a couple dozen dogs, and she thought that was a reasonable number.
Can you breed dogs, with the intent to win at dog shows, and NOT be a hoarder?
Sure you can, if you kill the losers, then your house isn't full of dogs.In some breeds, and in other breeds where the dogs have been socialized, (instead of drugged into being calm for the show), you can sell the losers to the public.
But, if you raise dogs as exhibition objects, who are born, raised and kept in a kennel, they are often unsocialized. They often have never been in a house, and have never been with around children.
To someone with plenty of money, who raises dogs for tax write-offs and who has fallen into dog shows, and for whom the goal is to win at dogs shows - the dogs often are like a 2 year old car - time to turn it in and buy a new one.
People have told me simply that they feel that it is too much of an insurance risk to sell the show dogs that lose, so they kill them (well they call it "putting the dogs to sleep").
Hoarding is covered in these open yahoogroup archives:
