Hoarding/Bad Breeder Living Conditions

We think it is important for you to see the conditions these cats were living in when they were rescued. I hate to call it a hoarding situation, because people might feel sympathetic to the person and call her a victim with a mental illness. This was not the case in the least. This was a bad breeder. A person who collected cats (and dogs) and exploited them for money by breeding them incessantly and giving them little care and consideration. Yes, she was arrested; not only for animal abuse and neglect, but child neglect. She received one year in jail as a sentence, which is far too short a sentence for the damage she caused. Several animals were dead or died in her family’s care after she was arrested. Once she was arrested, the family refused to allow the cats to be rescued for months, hoping she would return to pick up her breeding program again. But once she was sentenced to jail time, the family abandoned the cats and left them in an empty, cold house. Fortunately, the dogs had been taken by Animal Control at the time of the breeder’s arrest, but they left the cats in the care of the family.  Too many failures in this situation led to what we saw and what we are now trying to fix, not the least being Animal Control’s decision to leave the cats in the family’s control. The members of the family who were in charge are just as complicit in what happened. But make no mistake, the breeder, even from jail, was managing the movement of hiding these cats so she could take up her breeding practices once she was released from jail. She apparently did not take into account that she might be convicted.