The youngest of the four has the fewest cats, and also a dog. She has a number in her head of what separates a “cat person” from a “crazy cat lady”. She gave it as 30, but then said she thought she was near the tipping point with 6. Another lady loves her cats, but wishes she had 
human friends too. Another, a former bank employee, fell into cat rescue by accident and wants to stop. Her house is full of cats and she works hard to get them adopted. But she wants “more of a life than this.” The fourth lady defines herself as a cat rescue, taking them in and finding homes for them. She said she’s taken over 3,000 cats off the streets. She loves what she does but said, “I’d be happy if they were all gone to other homes.” Then added, “so I could bring home another hundred.”
That lady has problems with the people next door in her suburban neighbourhood. They bought their house in winter and didn’t realize 
until spring that there was a house full of cats next door. They keep a record of all cat-related annoyances. I’d like to ban backyard pools, but I think my chances of success are less than these people’s with their cat problem.
Documentary discusses rescue vs. hoarding
Agent Tre Smith of the Toronto Humane Society gave his opinion on cat ladies. “Animal rescuers” and “animal hoarders,” he says, are the same thing. They want to relieve the suffering of animals, but can’t stop taking in just one more. His point has validity, but I think simplifying it to that extent does a disservice to both animal rescue and the disorder of hoarding.
To say that animal rescue and animal hoarding are the same is like saying that all antique dealers are hoarders. Some undoubtedly are, and more have the inclination.
But a successful antique dealer or collector can love the objects without endlessly filling houses and barns with them. And a hoarder of objects can fill any amount of space with things and have no objective sense of their worth. It’s not a dichotomy of dealer/hoarder. It’s relative and on a scale of functional to dysfunctional. And there are grey areas where it’s hard to know if someone is an enthusiast or has a disorder.
It’s the same for animal rescue and animal hoarding. There are clear-cut cases, with someone like Tre at the functional end of the animal welfare scale. The horror shows he sees in his job would be at the 
other, dysfunctional, end: the person with 300 dead and ill animals squashed into a one-bedroom house. In between, there’s a lot of grey.
I liked all the women in this documentary and I respect what they are doing and their thoughts about it. But then I’m a cat lady wannabe. I’ll probably never really be one because one thing I know about it is that it’s a lot of hard work.
First posted on my St. Thomas Dog Blog Aug. 18/11. See my Cat People post for Ottawa’s ‘cat man’ and the Parliamentary cats. Also see 2 comments below.
. She explains the game and the training. There are good trainers and players, and bad. There are selfish, egotistical, win-at-all-costs brutes who take out their frustrations on their horse partner. Some training methods rely on infliction of pain to “teach” the horse. There can be individual and systemic abuse of half the polo team. The description of the training by the world-champion level Argentines is so horrific that I flinched at the mere word Argentina long after finishing the book. And that’s just the world of polo.
They are wonderful books, with horrible people and lovely animals and some nice people. Here’s a link for all 
books on Amazon.
