Saturday, March 08, 2008


Humane Society: Cats Make You Crazy

Pit bull owners are drug dealers, but cat owners are demented

Who's next in the extremist war against animal owners ?

Brace yourselves, cat lovers. Your 15 minutes of fame, or infamy, is coming soon.


Living with "too many" cats threatens your mental stability, according to the Washington (D. C.) Humane Society.

After trashing the reputations of millions

of loving dog owners and arranging the forced sterilizations and deaths of uncounted innocent dogs and other pets, Wayne Pacelle's HSUS and their accolytes move relentlessly forward.

Like sharks.

Whisper campaign against cat owners


Like a dead fly hidden in the rice pudding raisins, Humane Society employee Scott Giacoppo slipped the mention of how the ammonia in cat urine causes dementia in humans. He did it
almost casually as he was interviewed by an adoring newspaper columnist.

His fellow "team mate", Best Friends rep Sherry Woodard, agreed whole-heartedly with the startling new information:

The team explained the ammonia odor released from too many cats together is harmful to cats and humans. (Giacoppo said that on a long-term basis, the ammonia can cause dementia in humans. . . .)

New Jersey Star-Ledger columnist
Joan Lowell Smith swallowed it in one tidy gulp and duly reported it back to the public. No questions asked.
Smith must have a master's degree in science, too.

Feeding the internet rumor machine: humane societies just make shit up

So, let's take inventory. Junk science and myth sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States and other "humane societies" :

1. Pit bull owners are drug dealing gang-bangers


2. Tethering causes "aggression" in dogs

3. Michael Vick's dogs needed to die because they were the hopeless products of dog-fighting.

4. Mandatory castration of pets is a good thing

5. Pet overpopulation is a fact, and is caused by greedy tax-cheat breeders

Now we add. . .

6. Too many cats make you crazy

Inventing a mental illness: Humane societies expoit "animal hoarding"

Houston? We have a chicken-and-egg problem.

Are "hoarders" already mentally ill, as Giacoppo suggested?


Or are healthy cat lovers suddenly over-whelmed while changing the kitty litter and tragically slip into madness?

Do "scientists" like Giacoppo and Wayne Pacelle worry about such details?

I imagine that when animal extremists present the findings of their well-documented and peer-reviewed documentation of their new mental disease to the
American Psychiatric Association, questions like these will be cleared up.

Not.

Making mental illness a crime


In Democrat-rich New York, where busy state legislators never put down their pencils, they are way beyond the chicken-and-egg issue.

They have moved on to discriminating against the mentally ill.

In the race to be the first on the block with an animal extremist law to boast about, no less that three New York legislators have moved to characterize "animal hoarding" as a mental illness, and make it punishable under New York's cruelty to animals statutes.

The bills' sponsors, like Assemblymember Kevin Cahill (Democrat-Kingston) write that, despite the fact that the new law would be part of New York's animal cruelty
statutes, the concept is to strip owners of their animals, and punish address the medical needs of the criminal animal hoarder, before any animals are actually treated cruelly.

So Cahill envisions prosecution of a pre-crime, criminal, mental illness.

He would take cats and other animals away from their owners, and convict them of cruelty to animals, before the well-known effects of exposure to cat pee manifest themselves.

Animal extremist crocodile tears: This is for your own good

It hurts us more than it hurts you.

Its all so sad.

Liar, liar. Pants on fire.

Don't believe it for a second. The purpose of Giacoppo's remarks and bills like the ones in New York, whether dupes like Assemblymember Kevin Cahill and Star-Ledger columnist Joan Lowell Smith ever realize it or not, has nothing to do with animal welfare.

The purpose is to steadily increase the power of animal extremist organizations. Junk science, civil rights violations, discrimination and scare-tactics are just the means to the end.

Its as simple as that.

**********************

Blogger's note: Earlier this blog erroneously identified Scott Giacoppo as an employee of the HSUS. Giacoppo is employeed by the Washington (D. C.) Humane Society, and previously worked for the Massachusetts SPCA. Many thanks to readers who caught the error.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, animal hoarding has been a documented syndrome for well over a decade.

It of course refers to extreme cases, you know, the 150 cats in a one bedroom apartment kind of thing.

Trouble is, when the AR Gestapo gets involved, it's never a good thing. Animals die, people cry.

How many is too many? That's the question. And who says there will be ammonia, as long as you clean out the litter box, or if you live in a warmer climate, let the cat out to pee as we always did when I was a kid even here in Ontario. There were no catboxes back then of which we were aware.

I really wish H$U$ would stuff a sock in it, speaking of people who are unbalanced and demented.

Social Mange said...

Thanks for the heads-up. H$U$ and their ilk need to get some oxygen, and legislators need to write themselves a reality cheque instead of passing these bloody nonsense laws.

As Caveat said, how many is too many? According to H$U$ and its PETA buddies, none is the best number.

Donors and animal owners had better wake up and kill these organizations by stopping the cash flow.

SookeyCapote said...

Bluedogstate can relax about New York State Democrats going after so-called hoarder cat owners. The
state Democrats have much more important issues to fret over now
that their governor has been exposed for collecting prostitutes
across state lines and their junior
senator is in trouble for not collecting enough votes to win party nomination for president.

Cat owners unite! The mighty hath
fallen!

Anonymous said...

No such mental health diagnosis exists of "animal hoarder". It is purely a created term of meaningless convenience created by animal whackos whose admitted agenda is to eradicate all meat, work and companion animals. The goal of creating the terminology is to terrorize, discriminate against old ladies who feed stray cats, and to propagandize the public.

Anonymous said...

So would you say that someone who keeps 150 cats in an apartment is just an ordinary person who is helping out the animals?

In Hamilton, Ontario such an apt was discovered through the smell noted by passersby on the street. The people hoarding the cats had rented an additional apt for themselves.

What happens is, they start out with a few, take in a couple more strays, kittens arrive, things mushroom and pretty soon they have way more animals than they can care for properly. I get how it starts, I just can't imagine things progressing so far.


It isn't common, in fact it's extremely rare but it exists and has been linked to OCD as well as early social isolation.

Here are a couple of abstracts.

Admittedly from Tufts, but:

1999: Public Health Rep. 1999 Jan-Feb;114(1):81-7. Links
Hoarding of animals: an under-recognized public health problem in a difficult-to-study population.Patronek GJ.
Center for Animals and Public Policy, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, North Grafton, Massachusetts 01536, USA. gpatronek@infonet.tufts.edu

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to better characterize the problem of hoarding, or pathological collecting, of animals. METHODS: The author summarized data from a convenience sample of 54 case reports from 10 animal control agencies and humane societies across the country. RESULTS: The majority (76%) of hoarders were female, and 46% were 60 years of age or older. About half of the hoarders lived in single-person households. The animals most frequently involved were cats, dogs, farm animals, and birds. The median number of animals per case was 39, but there were four cases of more than 100 animals in a household. In 80% of cases animals were reportedly found dead or in poor condition. Prevalence estimates extrapolated from these data range from 700 to 2000 U.S. cases annually. CONCLUSIONS: Public health authorities should recognize that animal hoarding may be a sentinel for mental health problems or dementia, which merit serious assessment and prompt intervention. Improved cooperation between humane societies and public health authorities could facilitate the resolution of animal hoarding cases.

PMID: 9925176 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

This is interesting:

1: Mol Psychiatry. 2008 Jan 8 [Epub ahead of print] Links
To discard or not to discard: the neural basis of hoarding symptoms in obsessive-compulsive disorder.An SK, Mataix-Cols D, Lawrence NS, Wooderson S, Giampietro V, Speckens A, Brammer MJ, Phillips ML.
[1] 1Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK [2] 2Department of Psychiatry, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea [3] 3Institute of Behavioural Science in Medicine, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, South Korea.

Preliminary neuroimaging studies suggest that patients with the 'compulsive hoarding syndrome' may be a neurobiologically distinct variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) but further research is needed. A total of 29 OCD patients (13 with and 16 without prominent hoarding symptoms) and 21 healthy controls of both sexes participated in two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments consisting of the provocation of hoarding-related and symptom-unrelated (aversive control) anxiety. In response to the hoarding-related (but not symptom-unrelated) anxiety provocation, OCD patients with prominent hoarding symptoms showed greater activation in bilateral anterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) than patients without hoarding symptoms and healthy controls. In the entire patient group (n=29), provoked anxiety was positively correlated with activation in a frontolimbic network that included the anterior VMPFC, medial temporal structures, thalamus and sensorimotor cortex. Negative correlations were observed in the left dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus, bilateral temporal cortex, bilateral dorsolateral/medial prefrontal regions, basal ganglia and parieto-occipital regions. These results were independent from the effects of age, sex, level of education, state anxiety, depression, comorbidity and use of medication. The findings are consistent with the animal and lesion literature and several landmark clinical features of compulsive hoarding, particularly decision-making difficulties. Whether the results are generalizable to hoarders who do not meet criteria for OCD remains to be investigated.Molecular Psychiatry advance online publication, 8 January 2008; doi:10.1038/sj.mp.4002129.

Best Dog Videos said...

The worst phrase in the world still is "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." There is bad science all over the government (particularly the FDA). Fortunately laws which try to restrict rights based on what *may* happen tend to be stricken down quickly.

We hope that this is still the case.

- Your friends at Best Dog Videos