Crazy cat lady

The same friend who shared the horse story also made a comment about my fixation with cats (at least that's how I'm interpreting it- as a personal attack- or that's what the kitties tell me to think). Whatever. I suppose he could've been just sharing the love...

From Slate.com-

Not all animal hoarders are cat ladies, but most are. The typical person who gets caught with more pets than she can handle is a woman over the age of 60 who lives alone. Experts say there are a handful of animal-hoarding cases per 100,000 Americans each year, which translates to a few thousand incidents annually. The problem seems to be a global one: The Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium receives e-mails about animal hoarders in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

Dooley Worth and Alan M. Beck conducted what may have been the first survey on the issue in New York City in 1981. They found that two-thirds of the obsessive collectors were women and that 70 percent were single. Cats and dogs were the most commonly stockpiled pets, and women were proportionally more likely than men to acquire cats. (Subsequent research has found that people do occasionally hoard farm animals, rabbits, horses, and birds, but not as often as cats and dogs.) Worth and Beck found that animal hoarders tended to be somewhat isolated, but this seemed to be the result—and not the cause—of their large pet collections.

(and in my defense- there are only 2 of them in my collection- the neighbor kitties don't count. Neither of them is dead. They don't crap on the bed (unless it's an accident, and I clean it up right away). And I've never had more than 3 at a time. Defensive much? I guess so.)