Mom was an extreme animal hoarder and I've never known anyone that hoarded animals to the extent she did.
Hey everyone. I am the 26 year old adult child of an extreme animal hoarder. I want to make this post to kind of gather my thoughts about my mom's animal hoarding since I only just recently started unpacking this in therapy.
Growing up, I remember we seemed to always have pets, but I just remember having a normal amount of animals. Like a couple dogs and cats, maybe a guinea pig. It seems like as I got older, the amount of animals my mom had at a time increased. While it was difficult to pinpoint when my mom's animal hoarding got more extreme, it wasn't impossible. Up until I was 11, we had rented places and always had a landlord, so there were restrictions on how many animals we had. When I was 11, my parents bought a house and the property it was on, meaning they didnt have to follow the rules of a landlord. The house was just outside of the town too, so we had very few neighbors.
She slowly got more dogs over the years, and we had an amount of dogs in the double digits. When I was 15, my sister developed an interest in reptiles. So my mom decided to get rats. And then, she ended up finding my sister's bearded dragon interesting. Pretty soon, it seemed like any reptile, amphibians, rodent or bird that fascinated her, she had to have.
At this point, it would be pointless to try to pinpoint when we got which animals, because there were SO many. I'll just put a list below of all of the animals we owned. And just so there is no confusion, most of the animals on this list were owned at the same time.
-Dogs (30 by the time I was kicked out at 18, 50 by the time I went no contact at 23)
-Cats
-Chickens
-Ducks
-Rabbits
-Peacocks (I'm dead serious, and we had 4 of them at one point)
-Pigeons
-Pot belly pigs
-Cockateils
-Parakeets
-Chinchillas
-Guinea Pigs
-Rats
-Turtles (several different kinds)
-bearded dragons
-Uromastyx
-several different kinds of geckos
-frogs
-Iguanas (yes that's plural, we had 2)
-Degu (I cant remember if this was a rodent or reptile, I just remember the name of the animal)
I'm sure there are some I'm forgetting but one I didn't include in the list because it needs more context is mice. My mom owned mice. But not from a pet store, oh no. These were house mice in our cupboards. During the winter she would catch these mice alive, take care of them until spring, then have my dad drive a mile down the road to set them free.
She also raised live bugs for the reptiles, so if we include them we can add these three to the lists
-Mealworms
-crickets
-Dubia Roaches
This post is already really long, so I feel like I dont really need to go into much detail of how bad the flea problem was and how much the house stank. It was very dudty and dirty, so I felt like seasonal allergies were always flaring up. And although it was animals my mother hoarded, the house had the appearance of a house with a thing hoarder because of the items needed to take care of them. We got so many animals we didnt even use the living room as a living room anymore.
I need to know if anyone else who had animal hoarding parents ever have parents take it to these extremes before.