The palgrave international handbook of a 131

Animal Hoarding

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The recent inclusion of Hoarding Disorder in the DSM-5 may lead to
greater use of ‘mental health’ or ‘problem solving’ courts to address the
animal hoarding rather than conventional animal cruelty criminal proceedings. Such courts maintain a specialized docket established for defendants
with mental illness that substitutes a problem-solving approach for the
traditional adversarial criminal court processing. Participants are identified
through mental health screening and assessments and voluntarily participate
in a judicially supervised treatment plan developed jointly by a team of court
staff and mental health professionals. This approach may be useful for some
animal hoarding cases (Muller-Harris 2010), however, a therapeuticallyoriented intervention or negotiation may not work with certain types of
hoarders who are exploitative, irrational or uncooperative.

Sentencing
Animal protection and mental health professionals should advise the courts
on the desired components of sentencing in animal hoarding cases. Without
such guidance, some judges are inclined to make naïve recommendations,
such as requiring a convicted hoarder to do community service at an animal
shelter. A more egregious lapse in judgement is to order any apparently
healthy animals returned to the offender, presumably under the assumption
that because those animals have not yet shown obvious signs of physical
harm, they are not suffering or at risk.
The first objective is to ensure that animals are safe and receive any
needed medical or behavioral treatment, which is usually accomplished by
removing animals from the harmful conditions in which they have been
found, if this has not already been accomplished by a voluntary surrender
or other pre-conviction court orders. Often courts will also issue a ‘nocontact’ order prohibiting the convicted hoarder from owning, possessing
or being in proximity to animals for the duration of probation. It may be
desirable to allow the hoarder to keep a small number of neutered animals

that are subject to periodic inspection by animal control authorities. In the
case of rescue hoarders posing as a formal organization, the courts may
require the dissolution of the organization in addition to the surrender of
the animals. Since hoarding cases places a great financial burden on
responding agencies, it is desirable for courts to order reasonable restitution
for these costs. However, even when ordered, such restitution is rarely paid
(Berry et al. 2005).