It occurred to me that when cat hoarders are prosecuted and their animals seized by the authorities and placed in animal rescue centers, the cost of the services provided in caring for the animals, rehabilitating them and rehoming them should be paid for by the people who put the animals in that state: the hoarders.
In the state of Philadelphia in the USA they have an Act which deals with this issue. It is called the Cost of Care Act (2013) (Act). Unfortunately, I was unable to find the verbatim wording of the statute and therefore am reliant upon a newspaper article.
In this instance a couple, Ann Reddy and Warren Muffler, descended into cat hoarding resulting in the usual abuse of the animals. They were prosecuted under beefed up state laws regarding animal cruelty and face a catalogue of criminal charges.
Nicole Thompson a Humane Society police officer for the Bucks County Society for Protection of Animals (SPCA) was involved in the rescue of the animals from the apartment. She said that the Cost of Care Act allowed them to deal with the matter more efficiently.
The Act allows rescue organizations to make an application to a court for a specific type of restitution namely the recovery of the cost of caring for the rescued animals. Some of these prosecutions take months and during this time animal rescue centers are paying out substantial expenses while being unable to recover them. In addition, as I understand it, legal ownership of the cats can only be transferred to them though a court order which I presume is usually made at the end of the case. This places a heavy burden upon small rescue organizations with limited resources.
In this particular case the Bucks SPCA spent more than $53,000 caring for the 31 seized cats and 12 kittens. This included the expenses of housing and feeding the cat as well as emergency surgery. The expenses would have climbed perhaps to an intolerable level but for an application by a law firm made pro bono to the court requiring that Reddy and Muffler reimburse the costs of the shelter. The judge ruled that they should and made an appropriate order.
Although I’ve neither seen the law itself nor the court order I’ll presume that the order to pay the costs was linked to a transfer of ownership of the cats to the shelter. As the hoarders were unwilling or unable to pay after a 10 day period, ownership of the cats were transferred to the SPCA which allowed them to adopt them out thereby minimizing the costs. Muffler and Reddy remain liable to pay the $53,000 expense bill if they are convicted. The matter of shelter expenses were dealt with within the criminal proceedings at a relatively early stage. This must be welcome by rescue organizations. I’d don’t know how prevalent this process is in the USA in other states.
As I understand it, this law allows both an expeditious transfer of ownership of the animals to the rescue organization and recovery of their costs. This appears to circumvent the conventional legal routes such as restitution and gets around some problems of prosecuting animal hoarders because sometimes these cases are regarded as quite minor without sentencing including imprisonment on conviction. Therefore they do not warrant resources being allocated to them.
Perhaps bailiffs should be employed to sell items owned by people on welfare (benefits) to release cash. Often these people are cash poor but asset rich (TVs, smartphones, computers and pets etc.)
I’m a bit heartless on restitution and think it should be applied equally despite income or the source.
When the numbskull backed over my car in a near empty parking lot and the only reason i had her name was because more than one person got her license plate number told us on the phone we were stuck with the 500 deductible because she had no insurance and we couldn’t touch her disability check. That same thinking applies to a lot of people with limited income. You can’t touch my money so screw you. I see the same thinking applied to animal abuse cases all the time.
Here’s a typical example of the kinds of people throughout the USA who “rescue” cats these days.
http://www.dnj.com/story/news/2018/07/05/2-arrested-after-rescuing-more-than-100-cats-murfreesboro-camper-paws-police-animal-cruelty-adoption/759729002/
As stated in the article, “Suspects had been ‘rescuing’ the cats.”
The shelter that “saved” them the 2nd time is likewise also “rescuing” cats in the very same way. Hoarding them with nobody wanting them.
What happens in this case? Do they all pay themselves? Do the 1st rescuers pay those who took their rescued cats from them to only put them in another terminal no-kill hoarding situation? Do those who “rescued” them the 2nd time pay the original rescue people? The “shelter” that rescued them the 2nd time has gone “no kill” so they will keep these unwanted cats isolated in tiny cages and in any spare traps they have for a long long time. There is hardly anyone left who wants to adopt cats anymore in the USA, the market is glutted beyond imagine. Everyone who wants cats are already full-up on cats. You’ve even claimed that yourself by stating you won’t take in more than 1 cat. Why should anyone else do what even you won’t do? You can’t blame people for not adopting cats that they don’t want. Not even the feral cats in this situation above will be adopted as barn-cats because farmers already have more cats than they need, they already destroy all the excess barn-cats on their lands because nobody else wants those either.
Any unwanted cats are just going from one terminal hoarding situation to another terminal hoarding scenario today — thanks to the no-kill movement. (There are far worse things than death — this is clearly one of them.)
So who pays who?
The weakness is can they pay? Often they can’t and if they can it is a fraction of the amount of the court order.
I wanted to add a large number of these hoarders are what we call judgment proof. The law does not allow the garnishment of some government payments like Social Security. Most people even if there is a judgment the payment is based on their income which for many means some chump change every month. That’s unlikely to change because of our bankruptcy laws and the protections they offer our citizens.
Many states have this in some form however the deal cutting goes like this. Surrender the animal and there will be no penalty.
There is another argument that goes to the tune if you make negligent pet owners or hoarders pay for the inhumanity they have inflicted on innocent animals they’ll just dump them or refuse to reach out for help.
I watched on show on Hoarders where a cat literally died and there were bodies of kittens and older cats everywhere including the freezer and still everyone had to walk on tiptoes. All I could think was the woman should have been in handcuffs.
We tend to think that hoarding is a mental illness and it probably is. However simply having a mental illness does not mean the person does not know right from wrong. In the end her dump was fixed up to livable I believe and she was allowed to keep x amount of cats. She should have been barred by the court system from having any pets.
Very little was said about the fate of the cats hauled out of that house. Most had some medical issues from years of neglect.