Hoarding: how animal shelters create the crisis they claim to solve, by Ed Boks

Why managed intake without prevention breeds rescue hoarding, warehousing,  and predictable animal suffering.

This ANIMALS 24-7 guest column originally appeared as the January 26,  2026 installment of author Ed Boks’ own blog,  Animal Politics with Ed Boks.   

Boks may be reached at animalpolitics8@gmail.com. 

Ed Boks’ resumé in animal welfare includes having headed the animal control departments in Maricopa County,  Arizona;  New York City;  Los Angeles;  and Yavapai County,  Arizona,  plus the Spokane Humane Society. 

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For decades, animal hoarding has been treated as a pathology,  a failing marked by denial,  compulsion, and cruelty masquerading as care.  The public narrative is familiar:  overwhelmed homes,  starving animals,  sensational headlines.

But what if the real crisis isn’t individual compulsion?  What if it is the predictable outcome of policies that restrict or “manage” animal shelter intake,  underfund prevention,  and reward shelter metrics over animal welfare?

Increasingly,  hoarding is not an accident.  It is an outcome.  And in some communities,  it is being quietly normalized,  rebranded as innovation,  crisis management,  or even “lifesaving.”

A problem we pretend is rare

Merritt Clifton and Beth Clifton,  co-publishers of ANIMALS 24-7,  have documented animal hoarding since 1982,  spanning more than four decades,  tracing cases across jurisdictions,  economic cycles,  and policy regimes.  Their work reveals a stubborn truth:  hoarding does not arise randomly. It flourishes where systems fail to control intake, reproduction, and outcomes.

(See Animals in bondage: the hoarding mind;  and Casualties of the “save rate”: 40,000 animals at failed no-kill shelters & rescues.)

In that sense, hoarding is less a personal disorder than a structural one.  Wherever animals accumulate faster than they can be responsibly cared for or rehomed, and where prevention is chronically underfunded, hoarding becomes inevitable.

The shift from prevention to containment

Historically,  communities reduced hoarding the same way they reduced shelter crowding:  by investing upstream.  Affordable spay/neuter.  Accessible intake.  Early intervention.  Clear enforcement paired with support.

Over the past decade,  that emphasis has shifted.  National funders and consultants have increasingly encouraged shelters to prioritize metrics,  such as live release rates,  length of stay,  and managed intake, often without requiring parallel investments in prevention.  The result has been a quiet pivot from solving the problem to managing its visibility.  In practice,  that can mean capping intakes,  redirecting surrenders to “waitlists,”  or pushing animals to rescues without funding spay/neuter or field intervention.

Managed intake is a set of policies that delay or restrict when and which animals shelters will accept. They can reduce visible crowding inside a building while doing nothing to reduce the number of animals breeding, suffering, or accumulating in the community.

A parallel,  quieter shift

The longtime hoarding researchers at ANIMALS 24-7 have documented a parallel,  quieter shift.  As municipal shelters increasingly restrict intake, hoarding has not disappeared so much as migrated.

In place of the isolated individual overwhelmed by animals,  investigators are now encountering rescues and informal nonprofits that stepped in to fill the vacuum left by public agencies, often with good intentions, limited resources, and little oversight.

(See “Rescue hoarding” cases horrify Iowa;   Fallen “rescue angels”: Dawn Pennington, Tiffany Woodington, Corinne DiLorenzo;  Corinne DiLorenzo, worst convicted U.S. hoarder, violates plea bargain;  and Mississippi rescue “saves” 54 dogs; 60 starve & thirst to death in cages.)

“Geography is fate”

The ANIMALS 24-7 researchers have also noted a geographic concentration of large-scale hoarding cases in the American Southwest,  where rapid population growth,  housing instability,  chronic spay/neuter gaps,  and uneven enforcement converge.

Seen in that light,  unusually high rates of hoarding in parts of this region appear less anomalous than predictable outcomes of structural conditions rather than local pathology.

The result,  they report, is a growing number of rescue-based hoarding cases that emerge not from cruelty,  but from shelter abandonment of intake responsibility,  even in response to severe hoarding cases.

(See Impoundments from hoarding cases down 90% in six years––why?)

Animals don’t disappear when intake is restricted. They accumulate elsewhere: in backyards, garages, informal rescues, and increasingly, off-site facilities operating beyond routine public scrutiny.

When shelters warehouse animals instead of preventing suffering, hoarding doesn’t end; it gets institutionalized.

When hoarding goes institutional

What happens when hoarding is no longer the act of an individual, but the function of a system, specifically municipal sheltering policies reinforced by funding and performance metrics?

You get warehousing.

Animals held long-term with no realistic pathway to adoption.  Limited veterinary and behavioral care stretched across too many bodies.  Facilities nominally justified as temporary but operating indefinitely.  Oversight diluted by distance,  contracts,  or private partnerships.

This is hoarding with paperwork

The warning signs are well known.  ANIMALS 24-7 has chronicled them repeatedly:  rapid accumulation,  vague exit strategies,  reliance on hope rather than capacity,  and a growing gap between public assurances and animal outcomes.

When budgets, careers, and public praise hinge on a single number, like a shelter’s live release rate, every pressure runs toward visible rescue theater, not toward invisible prevention. In that environment, warehousing and off-site transfers can be misbranded as “lifesaving,” even when they simply move animals out of sight.

(See Why would a smart dog on the loose say, “Don’t rescue me!”? by Beth Clifton.)

A warning light in Pima County

Pima County,  Arizona’s new Animal Recovery Kennel (ARK),  for example,  was introduced as a solution to hoarding and capacity constraints.  It is not the headline here.  It is a signal.

The questions raised by residents were immediate and telling:  How will veterinary and behavioral care be provided off-site?  How will animals be tracked in public data?  What prevents a temporary overflow solution from becoming a permanent holding pattern?

These are not abstract concerns.  History shows that when systems expand capacity without expanding prevention,  they don’t reduce suffering,  they redistribute it.

ARK may yet avoid this fate.  But its existence reflects a broader trend:  addressing the consequences of unchecked intake and reproduction rather than their causes.

I explored these concerns in more detail in an earlier Animal Politics analysis of ARK, mwhere community members raised precisely these questions.

The myth of the “Good Hoarder”

Frontline advocates consistently report the same reality:  most hoarding cases begin with compassion. People take in strays.  Litters multiply.  Veterinary care becomes unaffordable.  Intervention comes late,  if at all.

This is why enforcement alone fails.  And why warehousing is not care.

Real hoarding prevention looks mundane,  not dramatic.  It looks like free and low-cost spay/neuter.  Field services empowered to intervene early.  Intake policies that accept responsibility rather than deflect it.  Data that follows animals wherever public dollars send them.

Animal welfare does not lack knowledge. It lacks courage.

A crisis we know how to prevent

We know what reduces hoarding. We know what makes it worse. Yet too often, resources chase downstream fixes instead of upstream prevention, because reacting to crises is easier to fund, brand, and measure.

Hoarding is what happens when prevention is sidelined and success is measured by appearances rather than outcomes.

Shelters cannot solve hoarding by becoming hoarders themselves. If we want fewer hoarding cases, we must require prevention funding, enforce intake responsibility, and demand transparency for animals housed off-site.

Elected officials, foundations, and donors must stop funding capacity expansions that are not paired with measurable prevention benchmarks and full data transparency.

Hold shelters to the same standards as individuals

Until animal shelters are held to the same standard they apply to individuals:  capacity matched to care, transparency matched to trust,  we will keep mistaking accumulation for compassion.

Real hoarding prevention must include:

•  Affordable spay/neuter that is accessible to low-income residents

•  Field services empowered to intervene early

•  Community-based support for struggling caregivers

•  Mandatory data transparency that tracks animals even if they move off-site

•  Intake policies that accept responsibility, not deflect it unto the public or unregulated rescues

Anything less is legalized hoarding disguised as animal sheltering, and it will produce the same outcome: animals suffering in the shadows.

Postscript:

After the above appeared at Animal Politics,  Merritt and Beth Clifton of Animals 24-7 offered additional context that strengthens this analysis.  While I highlighted,  the American Southwest,  the Cliftons noted that similar patterns of large-scale animal hoarding are evident across Sunbelt retirement regions nationwide,  including parts of Texas,  Louisiana,  Mississippi,  Alabama,  southern Georgia,  the Carolinas,  and especially Florida.

In these areas,  lower housing costs,  more land,  and aging populations can allow well-intentioned pet-keeping or “rescue” efforts to escalate into overload and mass neglect.

The Cliftons further observe that animal hoarding often intersects with broader societal failures around mental health and homelessness,  and caution that institutional denial and displacement can intensify harm rather than reduce it.

While this article focuses on sheltering policy and prevention,  their observation reinforces its central conclusion:  systems should not worsen suffering by pushing animals and people out of view instead of addressing root causes.

Afterword,  by Merritt & Beth Clifton:

Thank you, Ed, for another excellent analysis of the structural issues afflicting animal sheltering.

Society in general responds poorly to issues involving mental health,  whether those issues are alcoholism,  drug addiction,  depression,  schizophrenia,  or any of their outward manifestations,  of which animal hoarding is one,  typically beginning with post-bereavement depression and then including elements of alcoholism & drug addiction as attempted self-medication as the problem gets worse.

“First,  do no harm!”

While at this point in time we cannot really hope for societal institutions,  including the animal care and control communities,  to be able to effect magical cures,  we can at least hope for our societal institutions to not make the mental illnesses worse and more destructive of others’ lives,  as well as the lives of the victims.

What we have at the present time,  though,  making matters worse for both homeless animals and homeless people,  are policies which essentially try to deny that the problems exist.

Ever more mentally ill. alcoholic & addicted people are pushed out on the streets,  a problem that began when then-California governor Ronald Reagan cut government spending by closing the California mental hospitals,  and is compounded as ever more homeless animals are either pushed out on the streets or into hoarding situations,  often in custody of mentally ill people who are usually not yet homeless,  but may soon become so.

(It is not at all unusual in hoarding cases to find the hoarder living in his/her car because animals have rendered his/her home,  often an RV,  uninhabitable.)

Nothing learned in 151 years

The difference is,  we don’t really know how to effectively and inexpensively treat mentally ill humans, to curtail the human homelessness problem.  We do know how to effectively and inexpensively treat the homeless animal problem,  through low-cost and free high-volume spay/neuter.

We also should,  as a society,  have the brains to realize that the only way to prevent recidivism among animal hoarders,  an offense otherwise with an almost 100% recidivism rate,  is long-term supervised probation with frequent unannounced home checks.

However,  since voters remain reluctant to fund social services sufficiently to institute long-term supervised probation with frequent unannounced home checks,  even in cases of extreme child neglect, 151 years after the Maryellen child neglect & abuse case in New York City that was famously prosecuted at instigation of ASPCA founder Henry Bergh,  we remain far from seeing adequate funding for adequate responses to animal neglect cases,  centuries after the typical community response ceased to be a mob burning the “witches” in their homes with their animals.

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