Comments about ‘Animal hoarders — mentally ill?’

I have zero sympathy and zero tolerance for hoarders. As an adult who is the child of a hoarder I witnessed firsthand the destructiveness of a parent who hoarded everything from garbage and clothing to cats and horses. What I saw with my own parent and with other hoarders I encountered over the last five decades is this: they are arrogant, possessive and controlling; they are perfectly well aware that they are doing wrong but with the arrogant mindset they are absolutely convinced that even as poorly as they care for their animals, their animals would be worse off with anyone else. I think most of us have seen people living in squalor with hoarded junk, and again there is this arrogance and holier-than-thou attitude that somehow they are superior to non-hoarders whom they often dismiss as "persnickety" or berate non-hoarders for being "wasteful" because non-hoarders DON'T hoard. This isn't psychopathology at work, this is old fashioned garden-variety sociopathology. Again - these people are fully cognizant of what they are doing. THEY DO NOT CARE. Recidivism is rampant, a la Ericksons.